Playlist Gen

Turn an Apple Music playlist into a YouTube-ready video — with a Textual TUI for setup, track picking, and live progress.

Scrapes the tracklist, downloads audio via yt-dlp (duration-checked against Apple Music when possible), renders album art + scrolling title cards, then stitches clips with ffmpeg. Optimized for macOS / Apple Silicon (VideoToolbox HEVC), with NVENC and libx264 fallbacks.

Requirements

brew install ffmpeg deno
uv sync
uv run playwright install chromium   # required — Chromium scrape is the default

Python 3.10+ via uv.

Quick start (TUI)

uv run app.py
# or after sync:
uv run playlist-gen

1. Paste an Apple Music playlist URL → Load tracks (L)
2. Toggle tracks with space (or A / N for all / none)
3. Set resolution, backgrounds, workers, etc.
4. Generate (G) — watch overall + per-slot download/render bars
5. Cancel (C) stops downloads and kills in-flight ffmpeg encodes

Output: output/playlist_video.mp4 + output/playlist_video_description.txt (YouTube chapter format, ready to paste).

Headless / scripting

uv run apple_music_playlist_video.py "https://music.apple.com/…/playlist/…" \
  --output output/playlist_video.mp4 \
  --resolution 1920x1080 \
  --background-image assets/backgrounds/bg1.jpeg \
  --limit 5

# or:
uv run playlist-gen-cli "https://music.apple.com/…/playlist/…" --limit 2

Or edit the defaults in playlist_video/config.py and run with no args.

uv run apple_music_playlist_video.py --help

Layout

playlist-gen/
├── app.py                          # TUI entry (uv run app.py)
├── apple_music_playlist_video.py   # headless CLI entry
├── pyproject.toml                  # deps + playlist-gen / playlist-gen-cli scripts
├── playlist_video/                 # pipeline package
│   ├── config.py                   #   user-editable defaults
│   ├── models.py                   #   Track / PipelineConfig / progress / cancel
│   ├── scraper.py                  #   Apple Music scraping (amp-api + Chromium)
│   ├── downloader.py               #   yt-dlp audio + artwork + duration match
│   ├── fonts.py / backgrounds.py / text.py / frames.py / transitions.py
│   ├── encoding.py                 #   VideoToolbox / NVENC / libx264 + raw ffmpeg pipe
│   ├── progress.py / render.py / pipeline.py / cli.py
│   └── tui/                        #   Textual TUI
├── tests/                          # pytest (no network)
├── assets/backgrounds/
├── output/
└── README.md

Notes

• Audio comes from YouTube search matches via yt-dlp. When Apple Music provides a duration, candidates more than 20% off are rejected and the next search hit is tried.
• Description file uses YouTube chapter format (0:00 Title - Artist).
• Defaults: 1080p, no shuffle, full playlist (LIMIT = None). Use --limit / TUI selection while iterating.
• Scraping defaults to headless Chromium. Opt into the old HTML path with --fast-scrape.
• Generated media under output/ is gitignored.

License

Use / modify as you like. You are responsible for copyright compliance on any audio or artwork you publish.