Pulling Fun Insights Out of My Apple Music Library

A month ago I had a thought: I should be able to get those “Your year in music” stats whenever I want.

I have a huge library of music - especially in this age of streaming music where “add to library” costs ​nothing​. I am always recommending albums to friends and I’d love a way to share that publicly (the music streaming services are woefully walled from each other). And I have been wanting to re-discover songs from my “listening archives” - songs that I used to love and have forgotten.

Luckily, Apple Music lets me export my library as a giant, lovely, XML file. I can work with that!

Today I wrote a parser that can tell me stats about my favorite, played, forgotten tracks and albums and artists. I used it to generate a Music Listening page with some fun insights and recommendations!

If you’re interested in doing something similar or just want to see the code, you can read through the library parser and the script used to generate the page. There were already a few (very old) Ruby gems that did something similar, but when I tried them they either no longer worked were waaaay too slow to load my massive library. I’ll probably extract the library parser I wrote into a publicly-available gem soon.