How I sync my Spotify playlists to my iPod Shuffle

I have an iPod Shuffle 4th gen from 2014. It still works and is handy for listening to podcasts and music.

But who downloads music anymore? I use Spotify and have curated a few playlists there. I wanted to sync them to my iPod Shuffle. Here’s how I did it.

Requirements:

• Spotify
• Youtube Music Premium
• iTunes on Windows
• spotdl

I wrote the following steps for Ubuntu on WSL but they should work on other platforms with slight changes.

1. (For higher quality downloads, optional) Download cookies.txt for Youtube Music using a browser extension like this one - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt-locally/cclelndahbckbenkjhflpdbgdldlbecc

2. Download spotdl using pip and download ffmpeg.

   pip install spotdl
   spotdl --download-ffmpeg
   

3. Create a folder inside Music called spotdl and place the cookies.txt file inside it.

4. Create a subfolder for each playlist you want to sync. For example, I have a folder called spotdl/pop and another called spotdl/classical.

5. (For higher quality downloads, optional) Edit ~/.spotdl/config.json and:
   • update “bitrate” to “auto”. This will download the highest quality available.
   • update “cookie_file” to the path of the cookies.txt file downloaded in step 1.
   • update format to m4a.

6. Run spotdl sync inside the subfolder with the playlist URL. E.g. spotdl sync https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1FVwLROwulS08mWDkHBViQ?si=44d6bfb36f184932 --save-file sync.spotdl

7. Open iTunes and drag and drop the files from the subfolder to a corresponding playlist in iTunes.

8. Sync the iTunes playlists to iPod shuffle.

9. I also created a file called sync.sh in the spotdl folder with the following contents: find . -type f -name "*.spotdl" -execdir spotdl sync sync.spotdl \;
   This recursively syncs all playlists in each sub-folder.

10. Profit!

Next steps:

• Automate the sync process using a cron job or a task in Task Scheduler which is triggered when iPod is connected to the computer.