FAQ

Frequently asked questions for ytmusicapi. Contributions are welcome, please submit a PR.

Setup

Usage

How do I add content to my library?

songs: edit_song_library_status . Liking a song using rate_song does not add it to your library, only to your liked songs playlist.
albums, playlists: rate_playlist
artists: subscribe_artists . This will add the artist to your Subscriptions tab. The Artists tab is determined by the songs/albums you have added to your library.
podcasts: rate_playlist
episodes: add_playlist_items(“SE”, episode_id)

How can I get the radio playlist for a song, video, playlist or album?

songs, videos: RDAMVM + videoId
playlists, albums: RDAMPL + playlistId

How can I get the shuffle playlist for a playlist or album?

Use get_watch_playlist_shuffle with the playlistId or audioPlaylistId (albums).

How can I get all my public playlists in a single request?

Call get_user_playlists with your own channelId.

Can I download songs?

You can use youtube-dl for this purpose.

How do I package ytmusicapi with `pyinstaller`?

To package ytmusicapi correctly, you need to add the locales files to your executable.

You can use --add-data path-to-ytmusicapi/locales or --collect-all ytmusicapi to accomplish this.

YouTube Music API Internals

Is there a difference between songs and videos?

Yes. Videos are regular videos from YouTube, which can be uploaded by any user. Songs are actual songs uploaded by artists.

You can also add songs to your library, while you can’t add videos.

Is there a rate limit?

There most certainly is, although you shouldn’t run into it during normal usage. See related issues:

What is a browseId?

A browseId is an internal, globally unique identifier used by YouTube Music for browsable content.

In most cases you can compose it yourself:

Prefix	Main	Content
VM	playlistId	Playlist
RDAMVM	playlistId	Video-based Radio
RDAMPL	videoId	Playlist-based Radio
MPLA	channelId	Artist
MPRE	custom	Album
MPSP	playlistId	Podcast
MPED	videoId	Episode

Which videoTypes exist and what do they mean?

videoType is prefixed with MUSIC_VIDEO_TYPE_, i.e. MUSIC_VIDEO_TYPE_OMV. Currently the following variants of videoType are known:

OMV: Original Music Video - uploaded by original artist with actual video content
UGC: User Generated Content - uploaded by regular YouTube user
ATV: High quality song uploaded by original artist with cover image
OFFICIAL_SOURCE_MUSIC: Official video content, but not for a single track

Why is ytmusicapi returning more results than requested with the limit parameter?

YouTube Music always returns increments of a specific pagination value, usually between 20 and 100 items at a time. This is the case if a ytmusicapi method supports the limit parameter. The default value of the limit parameter indicates the server-side pagination increment. ytmusicapi will keep fetching continuations from the server until it has reached at least the limit parameter, and return all of these results.

Which values can I use for languages?

The language parameter determines the language of the returned results. ytmusicapi only supports a subset of the languages supported by YouTube Music, as translations need to be done manually. Contributions are welcome, see here for instructions.

For the list of values you can use for the language parameter, see below:

Supported locations

Language	Value
Arabic	ar
German	de
English (default)	en
Spanish	es
French	fr
Hindi	hi
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Korean	ko
Dutch	nl
Portuguese	pt
Russian	ru
Turkish	tr
Urdu	ur
Chinese (Mainland)	zh_CN
Chinese (Taiwan)	zh_TW

Which values can I use for locations?

Pick a value from the list below for your desired location and pass it using the location parameter.