spotify-downloader

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:29:12 +0800

spotDL/spotify-downloader

spotDL v4

spotDL finds songs from Spotify playlists on YouTube and downloads them - along with album art, lyrics and metadata.

spotDL: The fastest, easiest and most accurate command-line music downloader.

Read the documentation on ReadTheDocs!

Installation

Refer to our Installation Guide for more details.

Python (Recommended Method)

spotDL can be installed by running pip install spotdl.
To update spotDL run pip install --upgrade spotdl

On some systems you might have to change pip to pip3.

Other options

Prebuilt executable
- You can download the latest version from the Releases Tab
On Termux
- curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader/master/scripts/termux.sh | sh
Arch
- There is an Arch User Repository (AUR) package for spotDL.

Docker

Build image:
1

docker build -t spotdl .
Launch container with spotDL parameters (see section below). You need to create mapped volume to access song files
1

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/music spotdl download [trackUrl]

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader && cd spotify-downloader
pip install uv
uv sync
uv run scripts/build.py

An executable is created in spotify-downloader/dist/.

Installing FFmpeg

FFmpeg is required for spotDL. If using FFmpeg only for spotDL, you can simply install FFmpeg to your spotDL installation directory: spotdl --download-ffmpeg

We recommend the above option, but if you want to install FFmpeg system-wide, follow these instructions

Windows Tutorial
OSX - brew install ffmpeg
Linux - sudo apt install ffmpeg or use your distro’s package manager

Usage

Using SpotDL without options:

`1`	`spotdl [urls]`

You can run spotDL as a package if running it as a script doesn’t work:

`1`	`python -m spotdl [urls]`

General usage:

`1`	`spotdl [operation] [options] QUERY`

There are different operations spotDL can perform. The default is download, which simply downloads the songs from YouTube and embeds metadata.

The query for spotDL is usually a list of Spotify URLs, but for some operations like sync, only a single link or file is required. For a list of all options use spotdl -h

Supported operations

save: Saves only the metadata from Spotify without downloading anything.
- Usage: spotdl save [query] --save-file {filename}.spotdl
web: Starts a web interface instead of using the command line. However, it has limited features and only supports downloading single songs.
url: Get direct download link for each song from the query.
- Usage: spotdl url [query]
sync: Updates directories. Compares the directory with the current state of the playlist. Newly added songs will be downloaded and removed songs will be deleted. No other songs will be downloaded and no other files will be deleted.
- Usage: spotdl sync [query] --save-file {filename}.spotdl
  
  This create a new sync file, to update the directory in the future, use:
  
  spotdl sync {filename}.spotdl
meta: Updates metadata for the provided song files.

Music Sourcing and Audio Quality

spotDL uses YouTube as a source for music downloads. This method is used to avoid any issues related to downloading music from Spotify.

Note Users are responsible for their actions and potential legal consequences. We do not support unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material and take no responsibility for user actions.

Audio Quality

spotDL downloads music from YouTube and is designed to always download the highest possible bitrate; which is 128 kbps for regular users and 256 kbps for YouTube Music premium users.

Check the Audio Formats page for more info.

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Check out our CONTRIBUTING.md to find resources around contributing along with a guide on how to set up a development environment.

Join our amazing community as a code contributor

License

This project is Licensed under the MIT License.

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