Playlisty Support

Click here to see how to import a list of albums, not tracks, in Playlisty.

Whenever you import a playlist, Playlisty uses sophisticated heuristics to find the optimum equivalent track in Apple Music. Usually this results in a perfect match, but it’s not uncommon for Playlisty to find several Apple Music tracks which exactly match from an audio perspective but which have different cover art and were released differently e.g. as a single (released in Spatial Audio), an album, a “best of” album and even a compilation album.

Which of those versions you’d like Playlisty to choose will depend on your priorities, and starting with Playlisty v3.2 you can now configure how you’d like Playlisty to choose between different versions of tracks.

This section is intended to provide some recommended settings based on common priorities, assuming you are using Spotify as a source. You’ll find the new options in the “Control” section of Settings.

And remember: Playlisty will never deliberately pick a “compilation” version of a track unless it’s the only version available or unless Apple Music’s metadata is inaccurate (which happens more often than we’d like!).

Priority: “I want my Apple Music Playlist to be EXACTLY the same as my Spotify playlist”

If you spent ages getting your artwork just right on Spotify and want to keep it that way then these settings are for you. Click here to learn more about how Playlisty handles artwork. Also bear in mind that the exact track isn’t always available:

Priority: “I want the best possible audio quality on Apple Music”

If you want to upgrade your Spotify tracks to the best audio quality that Apple Music has to offer then we recommend the following:

Priority: “I want to keep my play stats as clean as possible”

If you like to keep your play counts against the same instance of each track you’ll want Playlisty to pick the most ubiquitous version available (usually the album version) when importing. We’d recommend:

Priority: “I’m generally Ok with my Spotify playlists but clean them up a bit where possible”

This is our default setting and is a good overall compromise. It mostly gives you what you have on Spotify, but will tidy-up your playlist by “consolidating” where possible e.g if on Spotify you picked a couple of tracks by the same artist from a compilation album, but Playlisty sees that both those tracks are available from the same original-artist album, it will “upgrade” the tracks to the original artist versions:

About Deep Search

Deep search is a feature introduced in Playlisty 3.6 to enable additional depth to your track searches in certain circumstances. You can switch it on or off from the “Matching & Playback” section in settings. It’s OFF by default, although when you tap on a track to see potential matches Playlisty will always perform a Deep Search so that you can see every possible option.

How does it work? When Playlisty searches for tracks it will normally keep searching until it finds a perfect match for the track you are looking for, including artwork & audio quality, and then stop searching. But with Deep Search switched-on it will carry on searching even when it’s already found a perfect match. It will search until pretty much every possibility has been exhausted in the hope that an even better “perfect” match is out there.

When would this be useful? For most tracks – especially recent tracks – enabling Deep Search will make no difference to the results of matching which is why we don’t enable it by default. However if you have tracks which have appeared on lots & lots of compilation albums (e.g. mainstream tracks from the 1980’s) enabling Deep Search will sometimes result in better quality artwork than the standard search. If artwork is important to you and you are disappointed with some matches using the normal search then we’d recommend giving Deep Search a try.

When should I not use it? Using Deep Search can be significantly slower than performing a normal search. More importantly it can use much more memory, meaning that smaller devices (e.g. iPhones) may close Playlisty down before matching is complete on larger playlists. If you are using an iPhone and Playlisty appears to crash before a large playlist has finished matching then ensure that Deep Search is switched-off.

Click here to see how to use Playlisty within Siri Shortcuts.

Click here to see how to import from your Music library to your Music library.

Since the earliest days of the iPhone, Apple has only allowed 3rd party apps to do 2 things to your playlists: 1) Create them, and 2) Add new tracks to them. That’s it. No deleting of playlists, no removal of tracks or amending the order, no updating of playlist names or descriptions. And definitely no artwork.

It’s been that way for 15 years and over that period we developers have given Apple plenty of feedback that that we’d like to do more.

Well starting with iOS16 & iPadOS16, we can: Apple introduced a couple of new functions at WWDC22 which finally allow us to amend some of the attributes of playlists, including descriptions and (crucially) tracks.

Being able to truly mirror the contents of a playlist from a service such as Spotify to an equivalent Apple Music playlist is one of our most commonly requested features, the idea being that you could simply run a sync each week and any track deletions, order changes or new additions on the Spotify side would automatically be reflected on the Apple Music side.

The Playlisty team have been working hard since the WWDC announcement in June to make this possible, and the result is a new kind of sync called “Replace Mode”.

This is a big change and rather than giving it to everyone at once we are making it available to users on an “experimental” basis, starting with Playlisty v2.24. This means that:

• We don’t claim it works in all scenarios and if it doesn’t work for you, please let us know about it ASAP (please don’t expect that we’ll immediately know how to fix it!). The new mode won’t do anything horrible to your music library or playlists but the occasional crash is a real possibility and you might get the occasional error.
• If you do get an error, please wait a bit and try again before contacting us. Most errors are related to syncing between your device & the cloud; waiting 15 mins or so usually resolves them.
• It won’t work on old playlists. Apple actually gave us new functions to create playlists, as well as amend playlists, and the new amend function will only work on playlists that were created with the new create function. In practice this means that “Replace Mode” only works on playlists which were created with Playlisty 2.24 or later and when “Replace Mode” was switched-on in settings at the time.
• The author of any playlists you create this way will be “Playlisty” by default, although you can override this in Settings.
• The progress bar while saving playlists is gone. The new methods from Apple don’t give us a way to track progress so unfortunately there’s nothing for us to show you.

Honestly most of the time we find this new feature works pretty well. And once you’ve successfully created a “Replace Mode” playlist we rarely have any further problems with that playlist: subsequent attempts to update these playlists usually go smoothly. We hope that’s true for you too.

Starting with Playlisty 3.1 you can save your Apple Music playlists to a file and then restore them later using the “Files” tab.

Important: only Apple Music tracks will get backed up using this function. If your playlists contain your own local tracks they will NOT get backed up!

To backup your playlists:

• Navigate to the “Files” tab in Playlisty and then select the hard-disk icon from the picker at the top-right of that screen. You should be able to see a tree view of all of the playlists in your library.
• Select the playlists you want to back up and tap “Next…”
• Playlisty will then go through a “Reading” phase where it retrieves all available identifiers for the tracks you’ve selected. Once reading is complete, hit “Save” as you normally would. Note: it’s not worth “fixing” any tracks which have not matched at this point. All tracks will be written to your archive file – regardless of whether they matched – and if any need fixing you’ll be able to do that when you import them later.
• When the “Save to Apple Music” screen pops-up you’ll see a new “Save to a file” tab. Select this and tap “Start”.
• You’ll be prompted for a location to save the resulting file.
• That’s it! Playlisty will create a .plif (PlayList Interchange Format) file at the location you selected.

To restore your playlists:

• Navigate to the “Files” tab in Playlisty and then select the download icon from the picker at the top-left of the screen. Use the ‘+’ button to add the .plif file you created earlier. Hit “Next…”
• Once reading is complete you will have the opportunity to select the playlists you want to restore from the .plif file by checking/unchecking the “Save?” checkbox next to each. If any tracks need “fixing” you should do it here.
• Hit “Save” and save the selected playlists to your Apple Music library as you normally would.

What exactly gets backed up?

If you save one or more playlists with this function, the playlist metadata (name, description, curator¹) and tracks (name, artist, album & identifiers, where available) will be written to the resulting file.

This means that if you immediately restore the playlist to an account in the same geographic region then the restored playlist should be an exact copy of the original apart from the playlist artwork (unfortunately it’s not currently possible to back this up).

If, when you come to restore the file, some of the tracks are no longer available (e.g. because they have been removed from the catalog or you have moved to a different region) Playlisty will attempt to find the best possible matches for these tracks at that time.

¹Please note that curator will not correctly populated until Apple make it available in a future release

What are PlayList Interchange Format (PLIF) files?

PLIF files are open standard files containing a definition of your playlists in JSON data interchange format. Each file can contain any number of playlists and there are a multitude of tools (other than Playlisty) which you can use to explore and extract data from them, should you wish.

To get you started we’ve published a script written in the Python language which will extract all playlists from a PLIF file and write each to a separate CSV file which you can open in a tool such as Excel. The script can be found here: https://github.com/playlisty/extract_playlists.