Sometime in 2018, an album I adored was pulled from streaming services. I was more distressed than I’m proud to admit when faced with the realisation that I might never listen to it again, and that moment started the data hoarding dominoes a-topplin’ in my brain. Never again!

The problem definition /

I’m going to talk about the approach I took to preserve the music I hold dear. People working with different services may face different challenges, so to give you context for this blog this is where I started:

• A library of 4500 Favourite songs on Deezer - importantly, these are Favourites and not a playlist
• A secondary library of 500 local files uploaded to Deezer (covers, alternate versions, generally music that wasn’t available on streaming services already)
• The relevant limits imposed by Deezer:
  • A playlist length limit of 2000 songs
  • No bulk-edit tools in-app
  • At time of writing, they were not allowing new developer accounts to be created so no access to the authenticated API

Following my migration I ended up with a library of 5000+ local files, with a reasonably high degree of confidence that none were missing. These are largely metadata complete, with a few weirdos and a few that have slipped through the cracks that I’m slowly cleaning as they crop up. These are stored across multiple devices, with automatic syncing between them whenever changes are made on any of the devices.

To talk about how we got here, I’m going to break down some of the bigger problems I faced:

1. Exposing my favourite songs to the Deezer public API
2. A discussion about building your collection…
3. Finding missing songs
4. Cleaning up my library - automatically setting metadata, deduping, syncing between devices

I for one am excited to get into this. Let’s go!

At a glance

What is covered in this blog post:

✅ How I took my entire library with me

✅ How I tidied my library, including deduplicating and auto-tagging tracks