Youtube Music API for Uploaded music

Question

Problem: Youtube Music sucks for playing back music you have uploaded for years. The app sucks, and the Android Auto app sucks. I've contacted the YT Music team many times, but they don't seem to listen to music ever so they don't even understand the problem(s).

Solution: Create my own app to play back my own music that lives in Google/Youtube Music. I'm an Android app developer so might as well fix this my own way.

1. Are there APIs for Youtube Music? I know there's an unofficial Youtube Music API, but that's phython, it doesn't build at the moment (Feb 2022), and it seems to focus on paid music, not my own uploaded library.

2. Would Google drive APIs do this? If so, is there documentation on how to use it? I can figure out the OAuth part, but I don't know where to get the data for the parameters in this sample api

3. Is there a better way for this? I just need to download the music files, and then create a player around them.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I was looking for something similar but the closest I got was ytmusicapi in python. It works for me and I installed it via pip install ytmusicapi. Its source is hosted on https://github.com/sigma67/ytmusicapi there, perhaps, you can see the YTM protocol. Authentication works by simply copying cookies from your browser after authenticating with YTM manually. That worked for me as well.

Another option is Kodi and a plugin they have: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=360827 (but that did not seem to work for me after 3 minutes I spent on it).

If you are serious about it and you can't get YTM protocol via the source of ytmusicapi, then you can perhaps reverse-engineer the protocol using your browser. Firefox's Tools->Browser Tools->Web Developer Tools is your best friend. After you authenticate to YTM, open the "tools", click on "Library" on YTM webpage, then in "tools" tab, go to Network and look for a POST similar to https://music.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=... right click on it and Copy->Copy as Curl. You will be able to see what auth-headers it sends and also what's the protocol for showing up your YTM Library.