Transfer Music Between Streaming Services With Houdini and Tune My Music
Sometimes, you want to grab someone’s Spotify playlist for your Apple Music library, or export it to YouTube. There are as many services for moving music as there are streaming services. And you will get the best results by using several of them at once. All of these apps are just a little different. Some are desktop-only, some are mobile-only, and some support a variety of second-tier streaming services. But they also all use slightly different methods to match songs. And since Spotify et al. Have about fifty different versions and remixes of any famous pop song, you can get a lot of false matches.
It’s useful – and yet faster than manual search – to run the same playlist across multiple services and see which one matches the most songs. So, while I recommended SongShift and STAMP just six months ago, I now also recommend Tune My Music and Houdini , which do the same and sometimes better.
All of these services connect to your various streaming accounts and allow you to select specific playlists to match and copy. I’ve used all of these services to move large playlists with a few obscure hits – mostly soundtracks from films like Crazy Rich Asians and shows like Sharp Objects , which would be tedious to collect by hand by looking for each song. Until now, no service I have used could find every song in every playlist. And every service sometimes chose the wrong match. But all the services I write about are good enough . You can choose any of them, manually correct their mistakes and not get upset. And they are all cheap or free.
iOS: Houdini
Houdini Playlist Transfer ($ 3 on the iTunes store) is my current tip when I move my playlist, although Tune My Music may soon replace it. It is very limited, supports import from Spotify or Apple Music and export to Apple Music or YouTube.
Houdini has a simple interface that allows you to select a source and destination and move multiple playlists at the same time. Once you have logged into your streaming services, it will remember your login later (although it may temporarily open the corresponding services).
Houdini first detects songs in the original playlist, which can take a minute or two, but works even if you disconnect from the app or put your phone to sleep. You will need to press another button to confirm the actual copy of the playlist, but then you can switch again and Houdini will complete the transfer in the background. When this is done, Houdini will prompt you to switch to the target streaming service so that you can play the transferred music.
The biggest drawback is that in my experience Houdini usually finds remixes instead of the originals. I used it to rip this NPR playlist of 200 songs and ended up having to replace a lot of remixes. However, a slight mismatch is better than a mismatch.
Houdini only works on your phone and only on the iPhone. So you’re going to be poking around with your thumbs.
To move music to or from a service, you need to sign in to it on the device you’re using Houdini on. This is true for all of these services, but logging into any system can be more of a hassle on your phone than on your computer.
Houdini doesn’t save great tracks for later. It warns you during scanning, so you can copy track titles, but if you forget, this information will be lost. You can restart the whole process, or look closely at the source and target playlists to find what’s missing. But this is frustrating.
Internet: Customize my music
Free Transfer Tune My Music loads directly in your browser, and handles tons of streaming services. And he found a lot more matches in one of my test cases – a Spotify playlist of 66 songs “taken from” the movie Crazy Rich Asians . (As an Apple Music user, I can’t find any user-collected soundtracks until I extract them from Spotify.) Houdini missed 13 tracks; Skipped Tune My Music 6.
But, oddly enough, TMM missed out on other tracks than Houdini. It more closely matched multiple tracks, but these exact matches were not available for streaming. This happens a lot with soundtracks – a movie studio or record label buys the rights to include a song in the version you buy , but not the version you broadcast . For example, the soundtrack for Crazy Rich Asians includes a cover / adaptation of Sally Yeh’s 1985 Material Girl. If you buy the soundtrack, you get this song, but if you try to stream it, you won’t. TMM found a version that you cannot stream. But Houdini found the original release of the track Yeh on the Yeh album. And that’s great. You see, things get really complicated and these services have to make a lot of choices. Here, too, a close Houdini match was found to be more useful than an exact TMM match.
Since each service skipped different tracks, I was able to put together a Crazy List Asians playlist from both sources. This is why I cannot recommend one service over another – and why I cannot recommend any one transfer service as one that will manage all of them.
Tune My Music does not save any skipped tracks either, so again, if you want to check, you’ll have to start the transfer again. And, as with Houdini, you will need to check for false matches. It seems inevitable if you are carrying anything other than the most basic music.
Even if you end up with the same version of all your songs, it could be an identical version from a “luxury” album or from a compilation. If you want to keep your music library neat, you’re stuck with manual searches because these transfer services can’t take care of pinpointing every detail.
TMM currently imports from Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, Google Play Music, Apple Music, KKBox, Amazon Music, Tidal and Pandora, or from a downloaded playlist or text file. It exports to Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Pandora or playlist file.
So for those of you using more than one streaming service, have fun managing more than one reseller! Is all this effort worth the cost of saving by not buying music? Probably!