So you want to ditch Spotify, but you don’t know how
A simple guide on moving from Spotify to a locally-stored music library
Date written: 2024.08.24
This guide was at first written with Cohost’s userbase in mind and published there. On account of the platform being shut down, I decided to copy-paste it here, only slightly changing it to better suit a non-Cohost audience.
The guide assumes you know how to download files from Github. In case you don’t (or are unsure if you do), here is a handy guide that might help.
So you want to ditch Spotify, but you’ve been stuck there for ages and the platform is doing its very best to make leaving it as difficult of a task as possible. I’ll try to help as someone who has also struggled with this! I’ve spent days figuring this stuff out, so maybe you won’t have to. This short guide is for YOU if:
You want to store your music library locally on your computer (and not move to another streaming service – there are many tools online for that);
You want to pirate at least a part of your library instead of buying everything at once;
You’re less tech literate than a big chunk of people interested in this topic and most advice you can find online is difficult to work with. Don’t worry, I gotchu, I’ll be suggesting simple (and hopefully more accessible) solutions. :)
To be clear: I will be suggesting programs and solutions that I have used and have experience with, but keep in mind that if you dig around you will definitely find some alternatives if anything doesn’t suit your tastes for this reason or another.
First: if you want to mass download your entire library (or a big part of it), I suggest transferring it to YouTube Music first. Downloading music directly from Spotify is not an easy task – 99% of the programs that offer downloading music straight from your Spotify playlists still download the files from YouTube, so you might as well have some control over this.
For playlist transfer I recommend Soundiiz. The free version of the service is good enough, although it doesn’t let you from transfer more than 200 songs at once, so I recommend splitting your library into smaller playlists beforehand. There are also other alternatives, like Tune My Music for example, so if you dislike Soundiiz, feel free to give it a try. (I don’t have experience with it though).
Next step: downloading the playlist. If you’re not scared of using the console, you might want to use yt-dlp, as it’s considered to be the best YouTube downloader, but... don’t worry, I don’t use it either, I am too scared of using the console 🥺 so I will recommend Tartube, which is a front-end for yt-dlp that I do use! It takes a moment to get used to, but after playing around in the settings for a bit you should be set. The program is completely free and doesn’t have any limitations – you can download as many songs as you want, in whatever format you want, with metadata and album covers. Keep in mind that if you're downloading too many songs too fast YouTube might attempt to IP ban you, so it's best to be careful regardless of which program you decide to use.
If you don’t like Tartube for whatever reason, a friend of mine has used Parabolic and didn’t have any issues with it, so it might be a possible alternative.
Now, you’re basically done. Your local library can keep growing. But I will also add some quality of life recommendations in case you’re looking for them ^_^ Let’s start with music players:
On desktop, I use Nora. It’s prettier than other music players I’ve found during my search, it allows me to edit the metadata of all of my songs, fetches the lyrics to them if it can find them, and allows me to keep scrobbling on last.fm.
On mobile, I currently use namida. It’s, again, very pretty (lmao, I care about this a lot), has a lot of customization options, and allows you to connect to youtube through it (though I haven’t felt the need to try this feature yet, so I have no idea how exactly it works). Other alternatives I’ve tried that weren’t bad either were Oto Music and Symfonium.
Want to scrobble on mobile? Pano Scrobbler is your friend.
Want a tool that would let you know when your favourite artists release new music? Try muspy.
If you’re smarter than me, you might be interested in setting up a self-hosted streaming service like Navidrome or Koel. I can’t help you here, as the absolute limit of my tech abilities is setting up Ubuntu (and this is harder than switching to Ubuntu, trust me), but the sky is the limit! Let us not be caged by any corporations’ whims.
Written by: Len 🗡️