🎵 cassettify

Download your Spotify library to tagged MP3s — organized, art-embedded, and ready to play anywhere.

Cassettify connects to your Spotify account and gives you an interactive terminal UI to browse your playlists, liked songs, saved albums, and followed artists, pick exactly what you want, and download it via YouTube Music (using spotdl). Downloads run in the background with an animated cassette-tape progress screen while you keep browsing.

Songs land as:

<output>/<Artist>/<Album>/<track-number> - <title>.mp3

with full ID3 tags and embedded album art.

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Install

The recommended way is with pipx, which installs Cassettify in its own isolated environment and puts a global cassettify command on your PATH:

pipx install cassettify

Don't have pipx?

brew install pipx                     # macOS
# or:  python3 -m pip install --user pipx && python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Or just use plain pip (into the current environment):

pip install cassettify

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Quick start

cassettify

On first launch, a setup wizard connects your Spotify account (see First run below), then drops you into the library browser.

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Command-line options

cassettify                           # interactive library browser
cassettify "Dark Side of the Moon"   # download a specific playlist by name, skip the browser
cassettify --all                     # queue every playlist
cassettify --output ~/Music/Downloads     # use this output folder for this run only
cassettify --set-output ~/Music/Downloads # permanently change the output folder (offers to move your library)
cassettify --setup                   # re-run the setup wizard (re-auth, change folder, move library)
cassettify --cookies auto            # grab YouTube cookies from your browser (see Rate limits)
cassettify --cookies chrome          # ...or from a specific browser

Option	Description
[playlist]	Name of a playlist to download directly, skipping the browser
--all, -a	Queue every one of your playlists
--output, -o PATH	Override the output directory for this run
--set-output PATH	Change the saved output directory, with an option to move your existing library
--setup	Re-run the setup wizard
--cookies [browser]	Extract YouTube cookies from a browser (auto to auto-detect) and exit

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Browsing & selecting music

Launching cassettify with no arguments opens the library browser. The top level has four categories:

• ♥ Liked Songs — your saved tracks
• ◈ Playlists — your Spotify playlists
• ▣ Saved Albums — albums you've saved
• ♪ Followed Artists — artists you follow → their albums

Drill into any playlist, album, or artist to pick individual songs, or select a whole source at once. Your selections are preserved as you navigate in and out — pick a few songs from one playlist, back out, grab an album, and they all stay selected.

Keyboard controls

In a list (categories / playlists / albums / artists):

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Move the cursor
Enter	Drill in (browse the tracks / albums inside)
Space	Select the entire source (all its tracks)
/	Search the list (Esc closes search)
D	Start/open downloads for everything you've selected
Esc	Go back a level (quits from the top level)

When picking individual tracks:

Key	Action
Space	Toggle the highlighted track
A	Select all
N	Select none
D	Download everything selected
Esc	Save your picks and go back

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Downloading in the background

Press D anytime to start downloading what you've selected. The cassette screen shows the current track, an animated spinning reel, a live status (searching → downloading → tagging) with an elapsed timer, the remaining queue, and what's finished.

Downloads keep running in the background:

• Esc on the cassette screen returns you to the library — downloads keep going. A status line at the top shows progress while you browse.
• D again reopens the cassette and adds any newly-selected songs to the running queue.
• Songs already downloaded (or queued, or selected from two places) are never downloaded twice.
• Q quits.

Tracks already on disk are skipped on future runs, so re-running is always safe.

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First run

The setup wizard walks you through connecting a free Spotify app:

1. Go to developer.spotify.com/dashboard and log in
2. Click Create app
3. Set the Redirect URI to exactly:

   https://127.0.0.1:8888/callback
   

4. Copy your Client ID and Client Secret and paste them into the wizard
5. Choose where to save your music

When you authorize, your browser opens to Spotify and a local HTTPS server catches the response automatically (you'll see a one-time self-signed-certificate warning — click Advanced → Proceed). No copy-pasting URLs.

Credentials are saved to ~/.cassettify/config.json with owner-only permissions. You won't need to set up again.

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Changing where music is saved

Two ways:

cassettify --set-output ~/Music/Downloads

This updates the saved default and, if your old folder has music, asks whether to move it. Or re-run cassettify --setup — the folder step pre-fills your current location and offers a "Move my existing tracks" checkbox.

Moving preserves the Artist/Album/Track structure and never overwrites — anything already present at the destination is left untouched.

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Rate limits & cookies

YouTube may rate-limit you after downloading a lot of tracks quickly ("you might be blocked…"). The fix is to download using your logged-in browser session:

cassettify --cookies auto      # auto-detect your browser
cassettify --cookies chrome    # or name it: chrome / safari / firefox / edge / brave / ...

Cassettify also tries this automatically on first run. Cookies are read straight from your browser (no manual export) and saved to ~/.cassettify/cookies.txt, which every download then uses.

• Chrome on macOS prompts for Keychain access the first time — click Always Allow.
• Safari needs your terminal to have Full Disk Access (System Settings → Privacy & Security).

If a block is already in effect, adding cookies (or simply waiting ~30–60 min) clears it.

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Files & state

Path	What it holds
~/.cassettify/config.json	Spotify credentials + saved output folder (owner-only)
~/.cassettify/cache.json	IDs of already-downloaded tracks (so they're skipped)
~/.cassettify/cookies.txt	YouTube cookies used for downloads
~/.cassettify/failed.log	Tracks that couldn't be matched or downloaded
~/.cassettify/.spotify_cache	Cached Spotify OAuth token

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Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• A free Spotify Developer app (Client ID + Secret)
• Internet connection

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Notes

Audio is sourced from YouTube Music via spotdl. Cassettify is intended for personal archival use only — please respect the terms of service of the platforms involved.

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License

MIT