Applescript to export playlists from Apple Music and shell script to rsync them to a remote server.

I have a Sonos system and I've set it up to look at my NAS for its music library and it can read m3u playlist files from a playlists directory in the music library. Unfortunately, Music only allows you to export playlists one at a time. This Applescript (and helper shell script) are my solution to allow my family to easily sync their Music playlists with the Sonos system.

Use rsync over SSH to sync files directly to the remote host. This is more convenient (and possibly faster?) as the user doesn't need to enter a password in the "Connect to Server" dialog box, but potentially less secure since it uses a passwordless SSH key. I describe some measures to lock that down so it can't be used to run anything other than its specific rsync command below.

For convenience we'll create a passwordless SSH key. For security we'll restrict it to run a specific command.

1. Make a new keypair with ssh-keygen (give it a non-default name and
2. Send the identity to the remote server with the following (where $IDENTITY_FILE is the ssh key that you just created, $REMOTE_USER is your username on the remote server, and $REMOTE_HOST is the server you want to connect to): ssh-copy-id -i $IDENTITY_FILE $REMOTE_USER@REMOTE_HOST
3. SSH into the remote server and prepend your new key's entry in authorized_keys with the following command (being sure to change /path/to/target to your desired path): command="/usr/bin/rsync --server -vlogDtprc . /path/to/target",no-agent-forwarding,no-port-forwarding,no-pty,no-user-rc,no-X11-forwarding NB: if this doesn't work add another v into the flags for the command used in rsync_playlists.sh and copy the command that it has SSH run.

1. Edit rsync_playlists.sh and replace the placeholder variables with the values you actually want to use.
2. Compile the applescript into an application, install it as an Apple Music script, and move the rsync script into the same folder:

osacompile -o "Sync Playlists.app" sync_playlists.applescript
mkdir -p ~/Library/Music/Scripts
mv "Sync Playlists.app" ~/Library/Music/Scripts/
mv rsync_playlists.sh ~/Library/Music/Scripts/

This requires far less setup -- everything is contained in the applescript file and you don't need to set up an SSH key, but it may be slower, and it requires the user to enter their username/password every time (or at least click the "Connect" button, if they've saved their credentials in the keychain). It's also possible for the script to time out (default is 4s) before the server connects. If you're having this problem, search for "delay" in the script and increase the number.

Compile the applescript into an application and install it as an Apple Music script:

osacompile -o "Sync Playlists.app" sync_playlists_afp.applescript
mkdir -p ~/Library/Music/Scripts
mv "Sync Playlists.app" ~/Library/Music/Scripts/

I took most of my inspiration for the applescript used here from @dpet23's Export-iTunes-Playlists project, which further exports the actual music files along with the (user selected) playlist files. I stripped mine down from that significantly, but am still making use of his clean_name function.