Why MLD Supports YouTube Music When Most DJ Tools Don't

The problem

Set prep doesn't live in one place. For some DJs it's Spotify playlists shared by clients. For others — and a growing share since YouTube Music absorbed Google Play Music in 2021 — set prep lives on YouTube Music. Curated mood playlists, editorial collections, friend-shared mixes, your own saved songs. None of those should require you to be a Spotify user to be a DJ. And yet, the DJ library tooling market has settled on "Spotify is the playlist source" without justification. Cratehackers is Spotify-only. MLT CrateMatch is Spotify and text-only. Lexicon doesn't import either source. If YouTube Music is where your prep actually happens, the existing tools quietly tell you to use a different platform.

How Music Library Doctor does it

1 Music Library Doctor talks to YouTube Music's public ANDROID_MUSIC client — the same API the YouTube Music app uses on Android phones — instead of asking you to OAuth in with a Google account.
2 When you paste a playlist URL or run a search query, MLD pages through the entire result set using continuation tokens. Each page returns ~100 tracks plus a token for the next page; MLD follows them until the playlist ends.
3 Deleted videos and private videos that show as gaps in the YouTube Music app are quietly skipped. A 300-song playlist with 4 deleted videos comes back as 296 tracks — not stopped at 100 with the rest invisible.
4 Each returned track gets matched against your local library through the same Track Matcher engine that powers Spotify imports — filename, title/artist normalisation, duration, BPM/key, acoustic fingerprint, audio quality. The matching logic is source-agnostic.
5 Missing tracks can be filled in via Smart Source Upgrade (Pro), which uses the same yt-dlp + ffmpeg pipeline MLD coordinates on your machine for the other quality-upgrade flows. Same Terms §4 frame — you are responsible for ensuring rights to replacement content.

Supported today

Rekordbox · Serato DJ · VirtualDJ (incl. Favorite Folders) on Windows 10+ and macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel).

Why native integration matters

The technical reason most tools skip YTM is that the matching engine has to handle multiple playlist source formats and YouTube Music's pagination is fiddly — your first attempt likely returned 100 tracks and called it done. The strategic reason is different: most DJ library tools were built when Spotify owned the playlist-sharing economy, and YTM crept up afterwards. MLD is newer (v3.0 in 2026) and built when YTM mattered. Pagination got hardened specifically in v3.0.7 to handle 300+ track playlists reliably. The result is the only major DJ library tool that treats YouTube Music as a first-class import source — no Google sign-in, no "export to Spotify first" workaround, no 100-track cliff.

Frequently asked questions

Does no sign-in mean MLD can't see my private YouTube Music playlists?

Right — public playlists only via the URL or search-result importer. For private playlists, you can export the playlist as text from YouTube Music and paste it into Track Matcher's text import, which works on any list regardless of source.

Why does pagination matter? Don't most playlists fit in 100 tracks?

Wedding DJs and mobile DJs often build long master playlists — 300, 500, 1000 tracks across decades. Set lists from full nights. Genre-spanning crate dumps. The 100-track cliff hits exactly the people who need the most tracks imported.

Is this likely to break when YouTube Music changes their API?

Possibly — that's the trade-off of public-API integration versus OAuth. MLD monitors for changes and ships fixes as part of regular updates. The v3.0.7 release was specifically a pagination hardening pass after a YTM-side change. The integration is maintained, not fire-and-forget.

Can I import a YouTube Music search query, not just a playlist?

Yes. Search queries work — paste "upbeat indie 120 BPM 2024" into Track Matcher and MLD fetches the search results, paginates them, and matches each one against your library.

Does YouTube Music import work for the Folder Library use case?

Yes. Track Matcher's source side is independent of the destination side. You can import a YTM playlist and write the resulting list as M3U or organize by Artist/Album into a clean folder — no DJ software required.