Getting your music in

Search for a song, rate it, tag it. That is the whole setup. It is the fastest way to see whether the idea suits you, because the first twenty songs you rate are the twenty you actually care about rather than whatever was alphabetically first in a four thousand song import.

Nothing about this is a lesser version. A library of two hundred songs you chose beats four thousand you inherited, and the charts, the search and the queues all work the same on either.

This is the one that carries a real library today, and it works whether or not Spotify can be connected here. It is a file you already have a right to, it does not touch our API access, and nothing about it depends on a free slot in a developer quota.

1. Ask Spotify for your data

Go to spotify.com/account/privacy and request your account data. That is the smaller of the two downloads and it is the one with your saved songs and playlists in it. You do not need the extended streaming history.

2. Wait, and expect it to take a few days

Spotify says up to 30 days. In practice it is usually two to five, and it arrives as an email with a download link. Nothing is wrong if it has not come the next morning; this is the slow part and it is theirs, not ours.

3. Unzip it

Double-click the file you downloaded. A folder appears with a set of JSON files in it. The ones that matter are YourLibrary.json, which holds your saved songs, and any file called Playlist1.json, Playlist2.json and so on.

4. Choose them here

Settings → Data → Import a library. Select YourLibrary.json and the playlist files together; it reads them in one go. Then review what it found and press import. Nothing is written until you do.

What arrives: your saved songs and your playlists, with their titles, artists and albums. They land on exactly the right songs rather than being matched by name, because the export carries Spotify’s own id for each one and so does this app.

What does not: podcasts, local files you added from your own machine, and your listening history. Ratings and tags are not in it either, because Spotify does not have any; that is the thing you are here to make. The screen counts each of these before you press the button, so the number that arrives is never a surprise.

If the service you use can be connected here, connecting it does the same job continuously rather than once: it reads your saved library, keeps up with what you add, and adds playback on top. The front page and Settings both say which services can be connected today, because it changes.

Connecting and importing are not exclusive. An import fills the library now; a connection keeps it current later, and the songs it finds are the same rows rather than duplicates.

Apple Music support is being built, and importing from an Apple library will land with it. There is no route for it today, and describing one here that did not work would waste an afternoon of somebody’s time.

Ratings are keyed to the recording rather than to a service, so what you build now carries across when it arrives.

Pasting a list of artists and titles, or uploading a CSV from another rating site, is planned and not built. It is the one route that has to match songs by name, which is the part of an importer that is always subtly wrong, so it is waiting on the catalogue work that makes matching trustworthy rather than being shipped as a guess.

Settings → Data → Export everything gives you one JSON file with every rating and its revision history, every tag, every like and playlist, and the track metadata needed to read them.

• It is not behind the paywall and never will be. The ratings are the irreplaceable part, and an export you have to pay for is a hostage.
• Every version of the export is a valid input to the import above, so it restores into a fresh account or a different instance.
• Importing one shows you exactly how many existing ratings it would overwrite, before it writes anything.

The import counts everything it found and everything it could not use before it writes, so the first place to look is that screen. The commonest cause of “it found nothing” is choosing the streaming history files rather than YourLibrary.json: those are play events, not a library, and there is nothing in them to save.

If it still does not add up, the contact page takes a message without needing an account. Say which files you chose and what the screen said it found; between them that is usually the whole diagnosis.