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I have a large collection of mp3 files that I want to listen to on my iPhone. I do not have an Apple Music subscription.

I have used iTunes on Windows to add a subset of my songs to its library and sync'ed it to my iPhone. I have afterwards reset my Windows box and lost my iTunes library.

At this point, I have a bunch of songs on my iPhone and I'd like to re-create the library automatically. I already have code that uses the iTunes.Application com object to interact with iTunes on Windows, so that's covered.

However, I need to be able to fetch the list of the songs I have on the iPhone and so far I've been unable to find a way to retrieve it (since we're talking about a few thousands of songs, I don't want to do it by hand).

Is there a way of retrieving the music metadata from my iPhone? At the very least I want song metadata (track name/artist/album/duration), ideally I want file sizes too to make it easier to match back to my original collection.

Note that I have both a Windows and a MacOS box so any ad-hoc solution will do, including AppleScript.

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  • Note: one very convoluted way would be to write a MusicKit iOS app and save the list of songs, but it looks like using MusicKit requires a full Apple Developer subscription - at this point it becomes easier to just copy song names by hand :)
    – David Airapetyan
    Jun 26, 2022 at 15:57
  • If there is a 3rd-party music player that can someone export the list of songs (e.g. for a playlist it can save to Google Drive or something) that would be good enough for me.
    – David Airapetyan
    Jun 26, 2022 at 15:58

1 Answer 1

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It looks like the Export Playlist functionality does the trick (at least on Windows):

  1. Connect the iPhone to the PC
  2. Open iTunes (I'm running 12.11.3.17 on Windows)
  3. Under Devices, pick Music (under the iPhone's name)
  4. In the song list, select at least one song
  5. Select File | Library | Export Playlist

The resulting file will be a plain text file containing all of the song metadata!

Note: it doesn't seem to matter how many songs are selected, the entire list is exported.

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