Playlist Management: Export, Backup and Sync Your Music Playlists

Music playlists are increasingly tied to individual streaming services. A handful of open-source tools take different approaches to getting that information out, backing it up, or keeping playlists synchronized.

Playlist Out is a playlist parser and exporter aimed primarily at Chinese music services including QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou and Soda Music. It can turn playlists into TXT, CSV, Excel or JSON files. It is useful when the goal is simply to extract and preserve playlist information rather than move the playlist between services.

Exportify CLI takes a similar approach for Spotify, but is particularly useful for structured music-library work. It exports playlists to CSV or JSON and can include Spotify identifiers plus ISRC and album UPC, making the resulting data useful for further processing and metadata matching.

Playlist Exporter is a browser-based exporter for Spotify and Apple Music. It produces CSV or JSPF (JSON Shareable Playlist Format), or copies playlist data as JSON. Processing takes place locally in the browser, so it is primarily an export/interchange tool rather than a synchronization system.

SongMirror goes a step further. It connects Spotify, TIDAL, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music and can synchronize playlists between them. It uses identifiers such as ISRC for track matching and can operate as a one-way, multi-service or bidirectional synchronization system.

These applications therefore occupy different parts of the same playlist-management picture:

Playlist Out → extract
Exportify CLI / Playlist Exporter → export and preserve
SongMirror → match, transfer and synchronize

The exported files also provide a useful bridge to other music-library software. CSV and JSON can be processed by scripts and databases, while standardized playlist formats such as JSPF can provide an interchange layer between applications.

For anyone maintaining a long-term music collection, playlist export is more than a convenience: it provides a way to preserve playlists independently of the service that originally created them.