I switched from Apple to Android. How can I move my music?
This for people who have large MP3 (or other music file format) collections on their Mac and use Apple Music to organize them into playlists.

This cannot help you copy encrypted or streaming elements in your playlists. It only helps with songs where you have an unencrypted file you own in local storage on your machine. Basically it’s for olds like me who backed up our CD collection to MP3 and still have ALL the files.

If you just want the software: Apple Music to Android Github repository

Every story has an origin

I switched from an iPhone to a OnePlus 13 this weekend. For those of you who aren’t familiar with OnePlus, it makes Android phones with flagship level hardware at a bargain price. When their latest went up for order in the USA last week, it was on special for $899. That included the same processor that will power the upcoming Galaxy S25 and other hardware and storage comparable to an $1199 Galaxy S24 .

I won’t go into why I’m leaving the apple ecosystem to avoid distracting from the topic at hand… moving my playlists to my OnePlus 13.

I couldn’t find a simple solution

Transferring all my music wasn’t a problem, it was making sure my playlists would survive. I have a variety of playlists based on decade, genre, and intent. Decade would be my 80s collection. Genre would be Ballads. Intent might be my “Rolling Cool” or “Workout” playlists to help amp up a road trip or 2 miles on the treadmill.

The solutions were mostly “transfer the music and then recreate the playlists on the new device” or “upload everything to a streaming service and stream it.” I didn’t want the days of work required to redo the playlists and I didn’t want to stream my music.

I started poking around

The Apple Music app on Mac has an option to export the library. So I tried it. The result was an XML file which contains all the data on your music files and your playlists.

I figured this should be pretty easy to parse and then iterate through the playlists to copy the files and make the playlist .m3u files. Initially, I thought of making a desktop app with Electron or something, but decided to just make a proof of concept with Node.js.

How it works

The XML file assigns a unique number to every song file (and its data), then the playlists are represented as arrays of song numbers. The node index.js analyze command runs through the list of files and outputs a playlists.json file. Edit that down to just the playlists you want to transfer/sync.

Once you’ve edited the file, node index.js export fills a designated folder with copies of all the songs and text-format .m3u playlist files for the files you selected. Move that folder into your music folder on your phone using a program like OpenMTP to facilitate copying the files from your Mac to your phone.

Could this be easier?

Yes. It is possible to incorporate an MTP library that will let it copy all the files to the phone directly so you don’t need to make (and eventually delete) the transfer folder. That will make it easier for the user, but will not necessarily be easy to implement. At the end of the day, wrapping it up in an Electron wrapper would make it possible to also make the playlist selection and exploration easier.

So if people find this useful and it gets good feedback, maybe I’ll make those upgrades.

Where do I get this Apple Music to Android Exporter?

This first release requires you have Node.js installed and know how to edit a JSON file, so it’s mostly for developers right now. Read the installation instructions at the AppleMusic2Android Github repository, and if you’re comfortable using them, please give it a try.

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