After a little investigation, it looked like a playlist always consists of a series of elements wrapped in a. Using my browser’s debugger “inspect” tool, I found the highest unique-sounding element that seemed to represent each “row”/track. So I scrolled to the bottom of the page until I reached the end of the playlist: now everything was in the DOM, I could investigate it with my inspector. I noticed that YouTube Music playlists “lazy load”, and you have to scroll down to see everything. Just extracting the relevant metadata from the page is probably faster, I figured: plus, it’s a valuable lesson in extracting data from web pages in general. Youtube-dl can download “playlists” already, but to download a personal playlist requires that you faff about with authentication and it’s a bit of a drag. Hold on tight, you might learn something! But what I wanted to share with you was the underlying technique I used to develop this approach, because it involves skills that as a web developer I use most weeks. My friend can fill up their Zune or whatever the hell it is with their tunes and bop away. Spoiler: I came up with an approach, and it looks like it works. The web interface to YouTube Music shows playlists of songs and streaming is just a click away. And in answering that question, in explaining how to work out that it’s feasible. Not least because Google’s arrangement with rights holders probably stipulates that they track how many times tracks are played, and using a different player (like my friend’s portable device) would throw that off.īut what I’m interested in is the feasibility. YouTube Music seems to permit you to do this using their app, but I’ll bet there’s something in their terms and conditions that specifically prohibits doing so any other way. I’m not here to speak about the legality of retaining offline copies of music from streaming services. It’s not a Walkman or a Minidisc player, I suppose, but it’s still pretty elderly. Now that Google Play Music has been replaced by YouTube Music, and inspired by the lampshading the RIAA did recently with youtube-dl, a friend asked me: “So does this mean I could download music from my Google Play Music/YouTube Music playlists?” My friend still uses a seriously retro digital music player, rather than his phone, to listen to music.
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