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← Back to the README

Spotify

Spotify encrypts its own audio, so streamrip does not download from Spotify. What it does is what spotDL does: Spotify says what a track is (title, artists, album, track number, ISRC, cover, and which tracks an album, artist or playlist has), streamrip finds the same recording on YouTube Music (by its ISRC first, then by artist, title and length) and downloads that, tagged with what Spotify says. Because of that:

  • The audio is what YouTube Music has: AAC of about 128 kbps (audio_format = "m4a", kept as it is) or MP3 at audio_bitrate. It is not lossless, and not Spotify's own quality. For lossless, use Qobuz, Tidal or Deezer.
  • A track YouTube Music does not have, or has only as another version (live, remix, ...), is reported as not found rather than downloaded wrong.
  • For better quality, move the playlist first. With Music-Sync you can move your liked songs and playlists from Spotify to Tidal, or export them to a CSV, and then download them from a lossless source: streamrip csv searches such a CSV on Qobuz, Tidal or Deezer. streamrip reminds you of this the first time you use Spotify in a run.
  • It needs ffmpeg like every source, and yt-dlp, which wants a JavaScript runtime to read YouTube: install Deno or Node.js if a download fails saying so.

Spotify's own rules for logging in (since February 2026): there is no shared login for outside programs, so you make a small app of your own in Spotify's developer dashboard, and the account that owns the app must have Spotify Premium. Without Premium Spotify refuses every request. If you have no Premium, someone who does can make the app and add your Spotify account under Settings > User Management. Making the app takes a minute:

  1. Go to the Spotify Developer Dashboard, log in and choose Create app. Name and description can be anything.

  2. Redirect URI: http://127.0.0.1:9900/callback, character for character. It has to be 127.0.0.1, not localhost; Spotify no longer accepts that.

  3. Under Which API/SDKs are you planning to use? tick Web API only.

    Only Web API is ticked.

  4. Save, open the app's Settings and copy its Client ID. You do not need the client secret.

Then run streamrip with any Spotify link. The first time it asks for the Client ID and opens your browser to log in; it catches the answer itself on 127.0.0.1:9900 (if streamrip runs on another machine, it offers to let you paste the address you end up on instead). The login is saved in the [spotify] section of the config and renews itself. If you had to give the Client ID by hand, it goes in client_id there.

What you see without Premium: "Your application is blocked from accessing the Web API since you do not have a Spotify Premium subscription."

(Without Premium the dashboard shows this banner, and every request fails with HTTP 403.)

streamrip url https://open.spotify.com/album/<album id>
streamrip url https://open.spotify.com/playlist/<id of a playlist of yours> spotify:track:<track id>
streamrip search spotify track 'daft punk get lucky'

What Spotify allows an app of this kind, and so what works:

  • Tracks, albums, artists and search work for anyone's. Search gives at most 50 results.
  • Playlists only if you own them or collaborate on them: Spotify blocks the tracks of a playlist you merely follow, and Spotify's own editorial ones. Copy such a playlist into one of your own first.
  • Podcasts and local files in a playlist are skipped.
  • An app can be used by at most five people (the ones you add under User Management). That is Spotify's limit for apps in development mode.

All options are in the [spotify] section of streamrip config open: audio_format (m4a or mp3), audio_bitrate (only when audio has to be re-encoded), match_videos (accept an official video when YouTube Music has no matching "song"; turn it off to be strict) and redirect_uri.

Credits

The Spotify support in this fork borrows from three projects. Thank you:

  • Music-Sync (AGPL-3.0, the same author). The Spotify login and the handling of Spotify's API follow it: OAuth with PKCE and a loopback redirect (streamrip/rip/spotify_login.py, streamrip/client/spotify.py), token refresh, and the rules for apps in development mode since February 2026 (Premium for the app's owner, ten search results per request, playlist tracks under item, only your own playlists). The matching of a Spotify track with a YouTube Music result (streamrip/client/audio_match.py) is adapted from its matching.py, and the screenshots above are from its README.
  • spotDL (MIT). The idea of taking only the metadata from Spotify and the audio from YouTube Music, and of looking a track up by its ISRC first and then scoring candidates by name, artist, album and length (streamrip/client/ytmusic.py); also the loopback redirect on 127.0.0.1 for the login.
  • MediaHarbor (GPL-3.0). Read as a reference for how an app talks to Spotify's Web API (client credentials and user tokens, following next links to the end of a list, backing off when Spotify answers 429); no code is taken from it. Its way of downloading Spotify's own audio, by decrypting the Widevine-protected streams with a device file, is not used: streamrip does not decrypt Spotify's audio.