Used Songshift to transfer my VelmaTV 80s playlist from Spotify over to Apple Music. If you’re considering doing the same, here’s my notes.
The free plan only lets you shift one playlist at a time. To do parallel shifting requires the paid subscription.
Once it’s done ingesting your playlist it will ask you to review songs it couldn’t find a match for. I found that using the full artist name and album title as a search string worked best.
Once that is done, it will display a button to ‘confirm shift’ and only then does it actually build the new playlist on your target service. I missed this step the first time because the UI for this is too subtle; it doesn’t display it as a dialog or modal popup, and I was confused why my playlist wasn’t showing up in Music a day later - because I never actually finished the import.
After importing the playlist, you’ll want to go through it to check for duplicates and also to see what Songshift’s auto-match did. Quite a few times it matched with incorrect live or cover versions, and other times it did a flaky match to completely different songs based on a single word. Useful to have your original Spotify playlist open so you can compare, delete and re-add correct songs.
A few songs were unavailable due to regional licences (the Some Kind Of Wonderful soundtrack! And nothing but bad live versions of Graham Parker and the Rumour?? C’mon, Apple.)
Weirdly, Apple seems worse at detecting duplicates than Spotify. I think I have twelve copies of the same Pet Shop Boys singles now. Be nice if it had a duplicates cleaner function.
It’s only available as an iOS / iPadOS app but it will run on M1 Macs.
I discovered a rather nasty quirk with Apple Music; it attaches your full real name, as the creator, to every playlist you create. It’s kinda jarring to see it every time, but they have no option to leave it blank.
Changing your name under the Apple ID settings doesn’t change it though - you have to go to the Listen Now tab, tap the user icon at top right, then go through the process to set up a profile before you can change the displayed name. (This is also where you can toggle profile privacy and whether it automatically tries to find / suggest contacts from your email.)
