As from the last post I suggested using Google takeout to download a user’s play music collection from their cloud.
It actually took a few hours for a ~8 Gb music library.
I received an email containing 4 links valid for 7 days to 4 different zip archives containing at most 2Gb of data as specified in the request.
This time the links worked fine, no 404 errors downloading. With my bad internet it took like 4 hours to download them.
I downloaded 2 files at a time, with each one going at like 300 kb/s of average speed. Not that bad considering I’m in the middle of nothing and the connection is shared with the rest of my family.
I suspect that with a better connection the downloads would have gone much faster because it had no problems speeding up sometimes when more bandwidth was available to me.
Some more technical stuff about the whole thing:
Each zip file is called takeout-YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ-001.zip and contains the following hierarchy of folders:
.
└── Takeout
└── Google Play Music
├── Playlist
├── Stazioni radio
└── Tracce
I guess it would change with your language, that’s Italian.
So a main folder called Takeout.
A subfolder for the service, mine’s Google play music.
Then folders based on the service layout I guess.
Tracce is the Italian word for Tracks, Stazioni radio means radio station.
Inside each folder there are a lot of csv files containing metadata about the songs, name, author, number of times it has been played, etc.
In the tracks directory, other than all the metadata already mentioned, there are also the tracks in .mp3 format, 320 kb/s bit rate, 44100Hz samples.
All the tracks are at the same level, not organized by author/record but at least they all have ID tags inside, complete with album cover. It’s just a matter of time to sort them out and put them in order, if you care about having your music organized in your folders too.
The track names are in the author-record-track.mp3 file name format with a weird 48 characters limit before the extension.
Yeah in the end it worked, I’ve seen that the backup process could be planned and automated for the various services. It’s interesting to take a look for sure.