Download music tracks, playlists, albums from Spotify using spotDL

SpotDL is a cross-platform command-line utility written in Python via which we can download albums, playlists, individual tracks from Spotify. It is open-sourced and made available under the MIT License. It also applies metadata gathered from Spotify such as:

• Track Name and Number
• Album Name
• Album Cover
• Artist Name
• Genre
• Music Label
• Release Date

Prerequisites

Before installing spotdl make sure that the latest version of python, pip, and FFmpeg is already installed on your machine. To download and configure the above prerequisites, click on the following links.

• python 3: To compile and execute the application.
• pip: To download and install spotdl on your machine.
• FFmpeg: To convert playlist file format such as m3u to an mp3 file.

Installation

Now let’s begin with the installation process.

• For Windows, open cmd as an administrator and execute:

pip install spotdl

• For Linux/Mac, execute the following command in the terminal

sudo pip3 install spotdl

To verify  the installation, run:

spotdl --version

verify version

Downloading individual track

Open Spotify in your browser and copy the URL of the track you want to download

Replace $url with the URL you just copied and run the following command :

spotdl $url

Downloading an album

Open Spotify in your browser and copy the URL of the album you want to download

Replace $url with the URL you just copied and run the following command :

spotdl $url

Downloading  a playlist

Open Spotify in your browser and copy the URL of the playlist you want to download

Replace $url with the URL you just copied and run the following command :

spotdl $url

Downloading via the search feature

spotdl 'query'

Here, replace query with the name of the song.

Resuming a failed/incomplete download

spotdl 'path to the .spotdlTrackingFile'

.spotDlTrackingFile are automatically created once the download process starts, and they are deleted after the process gets completed. You can give the path to the .spotDlTrackingFile file in case of a failed/incomplete download and spotdl will automatically resume the incomplete download.

Chaining up multiple downloads

spotdl $trackUrl $albumUrl $playlistUrl 'query' ...

You can chain up multiple download tasks by separating the URL/query with spaces.

Uninstallation

• For Windows, open cmd as an administrator and execute:

pip uninstall spotdl

• For Linux/Mac, execute the following command in the terminal

sudo pip3 uninstall spotdl