iXce’s blog

I’ve been a Deezer Premium (paid) user for almost two years, and while the service (and when I say “service” I mostly mean “the smartphone app”) was initially great, it has been worse and worse over the past year. Some songs started to get randomly corrupted (turn into awful noises) while they were playing alright the day before, some other songs started getting unsynchronized because Deezer renamed it, and lately the app has become a memory and CPU hog, visibly aimed at new high-end devices and not at my poor 2 years old Nexus S. Some behaviors are quite striking: while the app can handle playlists of 20 songs alright, it starts hanging forever just a few minutes after starting to browse or listen to a 180 tracks playlist. Last, it seems the app drains the battery a lot, which is not quite okai for something as simple as a music player.

All in all, when Google launched Google Play Music in France, I decided to give it a shot (especially since the special early bird offer is 2€ less than Deezer Premium+). The only issue is that I have carefully crafted my playlists over these 2 years and did not want to have to manually rebuild them, crawling through Google library one track after the other. I thus decided to script it, which clearly took me less time (less than 2 hours) than I’d have needed to do the manual work, with the extra bonus that others will be able to use it as well

I came up with two complementary pieces of Python code: deezerexport and gmusicimport. The two communicate through simple files representing playlists using a simple JSON format:

{
  "playlists": [{"title": "My Playlist 1",
                 "tracks": [{"title": "My Song 1",
                             "artist": "My Artist 12",
                             "album": "My Album 42"},
                            {"title": "Meh Song 2",
                             ...}
                             ...]},
                {"title": "Mah Playlist 2",
                 "tracks": ...},
                 ...
               ]
}

deezerexport is standalone (no extra dependency except Python) takes your Deezer user ID as a command line parameter and saves your playlists to the file specified by the --export CLI parameter. To find out your Deezer ID the easiest way is to look at a Deezer page source when you’re logged in and look for “USER_ID :” followed by an integer, which is your ID.
Getting the playlists exported is thus as simple as running:
python deezerexport.py 2529 --export playlists.json (2529 is the example ID from Deezer’s API documentation)

Once you’ve produced the playlists file, you just need to feed it to gmusicimport. This one depends on gmusicapi, which are python helpers for the unofficial Google Play Music API.
gmusicimport will go through each playlist track list and will try to find a good match for each song based on its title and artist name from the Google Play Music All Access library. Based on the score reported by the search facilities from the API, it will select the best match or warn that no good match has been found. After this search pass, it will proceed to create a new playlist in your Play Music account with all the matches it found.

Usage is super simple again:
python2 gmusicimport.py -u USERNAME playlists.json where USERNAME is your Google username, and playlists.json the file you produced with deezerexport (or with your own export script).

You can also use the --dry-run flag to test the script without actually creating anything but only check the importability of the playlists (i.e. if there are good matches for all the tracks from your playlists in the All Access library), and the -v flag to increase verbosity (moar messages!).

Feel free to report any bug or feature request on GitHub, and have a safe migration