Playlist Transfer: Move Your Music Between Streaming Services Without Losing Tracks
Switching streaming services is one of the most common reasons people lose years of curated playlists. The problem is not authentication or access — it is track matching. Each platform stores music under different internal IDs, so a playlist from Spotify cannot simply be "moved" to YouTube Music; every track must be found and matched in the destination catalog. Our tool does that matching automatically, using a two-step approach that covers over 95% of tracks correctly on the first pass, and flags the rest for your review before anything is written.
How Track Matching Works: ISRC First, Fuzzy Fallback
Every commercially released recording has an ISRC (International Standard Recording Code), a 12-character identifier that is unique to a specific version of a track. When the source platform (Spotify or Deezer) exposes an ISRC on a track object, this tool sends that exact code to the destination platform's search endpoint. Spotify accepts isrc: as a search filter; Deezer has a direct /track/isrc:[code] lookup. An ISRC match is unambiguous: you get the exact same recording, not a remaster, cover, or live version.
YouTube does not expose or search by ISRC. For YouTube transfers and for tracks from file or free-text sources that carry no ISRC, the engine falls back to normalized fuzzy matching. It strips common suffixes like "(Remastered)", "- Radio Edit", "feat. X" from both the source and each candidate, then scores string similarity using Levenshtein distance. Candidates that score above an 82% confidence threshold are auto-selected. Those below it are flagged for manual review with the top 3 options shown.
Duration is also factored in as a tiebreaker: if two candidates have similar titles but one differs from the source by more than 15 seconds, it is likely a live or extended version, and the score is penalized accordingly.
Supported Platforms and File Formats
The current phase supports Spotify, YouTube Music, and Deezer as live platforms, each using OAuth with PKCE in the browser (no server ever sees your token). File-format connectors cover every major playlist format: TXT, CSV, M3U, M3U8, PLS, WPL, XSPF, and iTunes Library XML. You can use this tool entirely offline by importing and exporting files without connecting any account.
The tool also accepts free-text input: paste a list of songs in "Artist - Song" format (or flip the order) and it runs them through the fuzzy matcher on whichever platform you choose as the destination. This is useful if you have a playlist from a blog post, a DJ's tracklist PDF, or a screenshot you have manually transcribed.
YouTube Music Transfers: The Quota Constraint
YouTube Data API v3 uses a daily quota system. Your default allocation is 10,000 units per day. A playlistItems.insert call costs 50 units per track, while each search used for matching costs another 100 units. A 100-track transfer can therefore use around 15,050 units when it creates a new playlist, which exceeds the default daily allocation. Unlike Spotify (which accepts 100 tracks per API call), YouTube requires one insert call per track with no batch equivalent. Before you start a transfer, the tool breaks down the matching, creation, and insertion costs. If the quota is exhausted mid-transfer, YouTube returns a quotaExceeded error and the tool surfaces it with a clear message rather than a generic failure.
Privacy and Security: No Server, No Stored Data
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Spotify tokens are held in session storage, while YouTube and Deezer tokens are held in memory. They are never sent to our server or stored in localStorage, and closing the tab clears them. Authentication uses the Authorization Code with PKCE flow for Spotify and the equivalent Google OAuth PKCE flow for YouTube, which are designed specifically for browser apps without a backend secret. You can revoke access at any time from your account settings on each platform.
File parsing happens client-side using the browser's native DOMParser and FileReader APIs. No file content leaves your machine.
Related Spotify Tools
If you are managing playlists within Spotify rather than migrating away, our Spotify Playlist Manager finds and removes duplicate tracks, sorts playlists by any criteria, and exports your Liked Songs library. To build a Spotify playlist from scratch using a text list or Spotify URLs, use the Spotify Playlist Builder, which handles ambiguous matches and batch imports of up to hundreds of songs at once. For identifying which streaming service pays the most for your catalog, the Streaming Royalty Calculator breaks down per-stream rates by platform, territory, and listener tier.
