This software is provided as-is for personal use only. Downloading music may violate the terms of service of streaming platforms or copyright laws in your country. Use at your own risk. I do not condone or encourage piracy or illegal activity. Using this with YouTube Music or other streaming services may violate their Terms of Service and is not encouraged. All opinions expressed here are my own frustrated thoughts about Apple and iOS and do not represent any legal advice or endorsement.
I am incredibly frustrated with iOS.
All I wanted was to download my music and just listen to it. Apple makes it VERY difficult to access and organize local music files on their devices.
Here are the scripts and instructions to make it happen.
- Use tunemymusic.com to transfer your playlists to YouTube Music (if not there already).
- Make all playlists unlisted.
- Put playlist links in
playlists.txt. - Install ffmpeg and yt-dlp. Then, run the “download all playlists” script.
iOS restricts how third-party apps like VLC can read file names. So, albums as albums don’t work well (as far as I understand).
Rename albums as folder names — so albums become playlists sorted by folders.
- Run the tag folders script.
- Use VLC’s file transfer over the internet to put music on your device.
Voila. You’ve bypassed an insanely frustrating iOS limitation that Android users don’t have to deal with.
That’s it.