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YouTube Music (public playlists by link)

Paste the link to a public YouTube Music playlist and Trobar reads its track list and matches it against your own library, like any other playlist source. No account, no sign-in, no credentials of any kind — for you or for whoever runs the server.

It is not a library provider: there is nothing to activate, nothing to switch to, and it does not take the place of Roon/Jellyfin/Subsonic or whatever else you use. Each link you add becomes one more playlist in the same pool.

Read this before you turn it on

This feature is built on ytmusicapi, which talks to YouTube Music's internal, unofficial endpoints. Those are reverse-engineered rather than published, and Google has never promised they will keep working or keep their shape. Nothing about reading a public playlist without signing in changes that.

In practice this means the feature can stop working, at any time, without warning and without anything being wrong on your side. Trobar is built to fail visibly rather than quietly when that happens — see When it breaks — but it cannot make an unofficial endpoint reliable.

Adding a playlist

  1. Open Playlists.
  2. Paste the link into Add a public playlist by link and press Add.
  3. The import runs there and then, and the result appears under the link.

Any household member can add their own. What comes back is a playlist owned by you and private by default, exactly like a personally-linked Tidal or Spotify playlist — flip its Shared/Private pill if you want the rest of the household to see it. Nothing you add is visible to anyone else, and no one else's links are visible to you.

Any of these link shapes work: the playlist's Share link, the address bar while it is playing (…/watch?v=…&list=…), the www/m/youtu.be variants, or the bare playlist id. Re-pasting a different link to the same playlist refreshes the one you already have rather than adding a second copy.

What you should expect it to find

Track artist and title come through cleanly on song-based playlists, which are the two fields the matcher uses. Album is almost always absent on user-curated playlists, which costs nothing for matching but means there is no album to disambiguate two recordings of the same song.

Quality is a property of the playlist, not of Trobar, and you cannot tell in advance from the link — the same URL shape covers both:

  • A playlist of songs — matches about as well as any other playlist source.
  • A playlist of hour-long "mix" videos — imports perfectly and matches essentially nothing, because the entries are 90-minute uploads whose "artist" is the uploader.

Two more ways a playlist can be misleading rather than empty: re-uploader channels put the channel name in the artist field, and live or alternate takes can match your studio recording confidently and wrongly. If a playlist matters to you, look at what it actually resolved to rather than trusting the count.

This is why the count is shown under every link. "0 of 79 tracks in your library" is the feature telling you that playlist is not usable — not that you own none of the music. Tracks that miss land in the usual per-playlist unresolved-tracks review, same as every other source.

What it does not do

  • It never writes to YouTube Music. There is no write path in the code at all — no liking, no adding, no playlist creation.
  • It downloads nothing. Trobar reads a list of artist/title pairs and matches them against files you already have. Music that is only on YouTube stays only on YouTube.
  • It does not do private playlists. Public links only. A private one would need an account, which is the whole cost this feature exists to avoid.
  • It sends nothing about you. No account, no identifier, no listening history — the only outbound request is "give me this public playlist", made when you add a link and on each sync afterwards.

When it breaks

A playlist that has been deleted, made private, or whose link was wrong shows as Unavailable. A refusal from YouTube's side shows as a fetch failure. In both cases:

  • Nothing already imported is changed. Tracks stay in the playlist, the playlist stays on any device you synced it to, and your selections are untouched. A source that can refuse for its own reasons must never be able to delete your things by doing so.
  • The error stays visible on the link until a fetch succeeds. Use Refresh to retry immediately rather than waiting for the next sync.
  • Remove is the only thing that deletes the playlist, because that is you asking for it. Devices are told to remove the files, the same as deleting any other playlist.

Other services

The obvious question is why this is not "paste any playlist link". The answer inverts what you would expect:

Service Public playlist by link, no account?
YouTube Music Works — via the unofficial endpoints above.
Spotify Works, up to 100 tracks — not through its API, whose Get Playlist endpoint returns the track list only to a playlist's owner or collaborators, but through its embed player page. See Spotify links.
Tidal Not today. Playlist endpoints need a user token whether or not the playlist is public. TIDAL has said it is considering opening public-playlist endpoints to the client-credentials flow; if that ships, it becomes the first sanctioned backend for this feature.

So neither service where this works does it through a sanctioned API, and the two sanctioned APIs specifically forbid it. That is why each source has its own page rather than a general "link importer" one.

For the person running the server

Nothing to configure. The feature has no settings, no credentials and no admin panel entry: a subscription is the whole of its configuration, and it is per-user.

With no links added anywhere, nothing is contacted — the dependency is not even imported until the first fetch. If ytmusicapi is missing from an install, adding a link reports a failure and everything else keeps working.