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Comment by mkhalil | Hacker News Reader

I know of a even more impressive website that will transfer playlists from Spotify (or 20 other platforms, including text files) to 20 other platforms or a text file. I will share the link, but don't hug it to death y'all. :)

https://app.tunemymusic.com/transfer

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I used this. It worked fine. It's a shame it's necessary though... I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.

The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be all that would be needed to move between services when both apps have the same songs.

One could also imagine a standardized ismn://<number> URL format that could open in your preferred music app, and this could work even without a streaming service if you already own that song in your personal music collection.

ISMN seems to exist: https://www.loc.gov/ismn/about.html

But, I've never actually seen it used for recordings; it seems to be focused solely on music notation. So, it would be nice to have some kind of recording-focused identifier for keeping track of specific performances between services.

Yeah, but the next step is to make identifier somethink like a has so the media can be content addressable.

Wait, we can't have that. It's too convenient

Content addressable doesn't really work here... different apps may have the same recordings encoded in different formats and bitrates, but they are still the same recording. Unless you meant "content addressable" in the sense of a uniquely assigned identifier like I was already talking about, and not a computed identifier from the raw bytes of the file like a hash.

This sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this.

[0] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format

[2] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

Now we just need to associate payment/attribution related metadata with those identifiers

They’re called magnet links.

MusicBrainz has also been making a list of unique identifiers for music tracks: https://musicbrainz.org/

This exists and is called ISRC. This metadata is embedded in a subchannel on CD's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...

Cool, I didn’t know that. I wish it were actually used by the various music apps.

It's a pity that compression is likely to provide subtly different data under different network conditions. If everything were lossless we could just use hashes as identifiers and proceed without the participation of the apps.

After all, they have no incentive to make this easy for us.

This is actually a beautiful idea. It'd definitely be possible for music purchased through bandcamp since lossless is generally available for most releases. Commenting to bookmark this.

> I wish there was some kind of vendor-neutral import/export format rather than requiring a third party to solve the whole matrix of integrations.

"vendor-neutral import/export format" sounds like the definition of third party. It's not that there shouldn't be a third party, it's that spotify etc. should adopt it.

I recently made a transition from Spotify to Tidal and found the suggested transfer service to do the job really clumsy. In my case I've transferred favorite artists and the service was just trying to match them by name which failed miserably when there was more than one with the same name - seemingly it picked one randomly. I wonder how this service would do.

My impression is that Tidal does a bad job of this in general. I have lots of artists I follow on there who have albums appearing on their page from identically named but different artists.

Don't get me started on that. How can a company which core business is content streaming be that lazy is beyond me. I often feedback them the errors, but even such feedback is difficult.

Sadly it’s an expensive scaling problem. Not trivial to solve at the scale streaming platforms operate at.

Discogs seems to handle it just fine.

Well, at least they could make it easy to feedback, like a button on the artist/album page. But it's it really that hard to do it themselves? They are not getting a million albums per day, do they? I'm sure there are ways to improve the process with a little good will.

I recently made the switch as well and used spotify_to_tidal [1] which is the free and open-source alternative to what Tidal recommends and it worked pretty fine! it couldn't find some specific tracks and I bet it does a somewhat similar name match as the one Tidal recommends, but at least this one doesn't have a limitation by the number of tracks, in case it's useful to someone else.

[1] https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal

other than name match, what exactly do you expect them to attempt to do? use a shazam like process to analyze each potential match?

It could check the album names on both sides, for example. And in case of uncertainty, it could make a list of dubious matches. Stuff like that, I guess.

The point is that it's all just metadata. There's a saying along the lines of "the filename is a really bad place to store metadata". Whether the title is the same and/or the album name as an additional qualifier, it's all subject to data entry which is prone to mistakes.

To some extent yes, but that data is usually sent from record label with the same values for different streaming services. But anyway, don't tell me that they can't at least figure out that there are more than one artists with the same name...

You'd think that, but not in my experience. It's not like they are getting ID3 tags populated by Gracenote or some such service. You're also assuming that the streaming platforms do not attempt to manipulate the metadata they received for their own internal policies. See my other comment in a sibling thread for specific examples.

Too much inside baseball experience with the data the studios/labels believe is perfect that when received is far from perfect leaving the individual platforms to deal with it.

Record labels are actually quite terrible at providing this. You would assume otherwise because it’s in their best interest. However, I work in the industry and can tell you it’s a ridiculous problem because their is no standard and lots of human effort in cleanup and cleanliness.

Allll the other associated metadata is useful...

You say that as if all metadata is the same. I can tell you it is not. Every company that uses metadata will at some point use a field differently from someone else. "The Album" => "Album, The" type of things. "Album" => "Album (YYYY)" types of things. "Track remix by Artist" => "Track" + "Producer" as different fields.

Use the Spotify artist ID[0] to find the Wikidata entry, and then grab the Tidal artist ID from the Wikidata entry to match the correct artist on Tidal. Even better if you use album IDs. (Brain explodes if you could use a song ID.)

Realistically, Wikidata may not have enough of this data populated, but it is nice to dream. And it seems plausible that MusicBrainz or similar might have enough data.

[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1902

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4576

Edit: P1902 has 57000 uses and P4576 has 7000. So YMMV big time.

Great, yet another attempt at solving this with yet another standard that not everyone will use. Why did you pick this attempt instead of something more common like Gracenote?

Gracenote is owned by private equity and has limited availability of data. I prefer to encourage the use of more open data. MusicBrainz or Discogs would have been better choices than Wikidata based on quantity of entries. Though in 5 minutes I have been unable to find if Discogs even has external IDs, and I am not sure of the quantity of Spotify IDs that MusicBrainz has.

Great that you want to use open sources, but now, you've just provided more evidence for my case as you've listed 2 new "sources of truth". Even that fact that there are plural truth sources indicates no one source is truth. Why are they different? Same reasons that have already been discussed

So, we really have not made any forward progress here

Reality is that simply very few people use this functionality.

If those two open access sources become big enough, it is quite clear that someone will make a project to reconcile the data between them.

If any of those projects skyrockets the same way wikipedia skyrocketed, then the topic will be solved.

If If If. This isn't blind pessimism. This is from someone that has dealt with metadata from studios/labels for just under two decades. IMDB was meant to do this for movies/tv, but yet it's an absolute dumpster fire.

So from an outside perspective, it's fun to dream a little dream, but from a gray beard it's just yet another dream.

Anyone know of a technical solution to retrieve a list of 'titles' for deleted videos from a youtube playlist? Have at least 10x Playlists full of removed/deleted music that has been inappropriately copyright striked, but I can't even reconstitute the playlists as I don't have the Title/Artist for the removed tracks.

I manually copy pasted the video urls into services that lookup details and check web archive

Paste the URL into savefrom, they have a cache

Or this https://playlists.cloud/

Thanks for sharing! I didn't want to sign up for a monthly subscription to transfer my music...

I didn't even know TuneMyMusic had a premium service, but fwiw, it's free for the first 500 songs. I've only used it a few times and was pretty impressed at how many services it supports.

Agreed.

Having said that I have used https://ko-fi.com/zzzrod to support (if it can be called that) the dev (the link is from app homepage) as per my personal capacity. Because it is such an excellent service and provided for free and also because it isn't behind subscription. So thought I will share that. But of course it is perfectly fine to use it for free as well if one wants to. Cheers.

I love TuneMyMusic, I exported my Spotify when I left, imported everything to Deezer, and now I periodically export everything from Deezer so I can slice and dice it in Excel for various reasons.

That’s the one I used when I moved from Spotify to YouTube music. Luckily my playlists contained less than 500 songs so the whole migration was easy and free.

I've used this site before when moving from Spotify to Youtube Music, worked really well and didn't take long to transfer everything over.

If this does as you say it does… thank you for posting this. Ive been thinking of trying to get away from spotify but felt trapped at the playlist loss. My kid are now conditioned for instant music that might be the bigger challenge.

Playlisty is a great iOS/MacOS app for doing it locally if you're using Apple Music.

https://www.obdura.com/playlisty/

I used Soundiiz to go from Spotify to YouTube. I paid 5$, but was happy to pay.

Soundiiz does this also. I've been using it for years. Great service

I found Soundiiz pretty bad, at least when transferring from Spotify and Apple Music to Youtube Music. It failed to find about a hundred tracks from the library of couple of thousand tracks, and they weren't some niche, rare things, too. I had to manually search for them, using the same titles, and found most of them.

This is so helpful. This is the one blocking piece preventing my transfer off Spotify.

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