Русский

Sort YM

Sorts your Yandex Music liked tracks into playlists named Genre — RU / Genre — INT.

$ python -m sort_ym report

Playlist breakdown:
  Rock — INT: 143
  Rock — RU: 287
  Rap — RU: 512
  ...

Report saved: out/report.csv

Install

Requirements: Python 3.11+ (uses tomllib from the standard library), Windows/Linux/macOS, internet access.

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install -r requirements.txt

For development (tests):

.venv\Scripts\pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

What it does

.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym auth                    # log in to a Yandex account via device-flow and save the token to .token
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym fetch                   # download liked tracks (cache/tracks.json) and their artists' genres (cache/artist_genres.json); does not change the account
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym report                  # compute genre and language per track, save out/report.csv (does not change the account)
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym apply --limit 20 --yes  # dry run: create playlists and add the first 20 tracks
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym apply --yes             # create playlists and add all tracks (changes the account)

On repeated runs fetch only downloads new tracks, and apply does not duplicate tracks already added.

Full cache cleanup

To start over from scratch (re-fetch everything), delete the cache/ folder:

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force cache

The cache consists of four files:

• cache/tracks.json — liked tracks and their metadata (including artist ids);
• cache/artist_genres.json — genre tags for each artist (an artist can have several);
• cache/genre_catalog.json — a snapshot of Yandex's genre tree as of the last run;
• cache/lyrics_lang.json — detected lyrics language per track.

Deleting cache/ makes fetch and report re-fetch everything from scratch on the next run.

You can also delete the generated report:

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force out

It's just analysis output — deleting it doesn't affect the next report run.

Important: the .token file (OAuth token) is not part of the cache and is not removed by clearing cache/. Clearing the cache does not log you out. To force re-authentication, delete .token separately:

Remove-Item .token

How genre and language are determined

• Genre is determined at the sub-genre level (Rock, Punk, Indie, Alternative, Metal, ..., not just the 11 top-level buckets), combining two signals:

  1. The track's album genre (genre_raw) — a per-track signal.
  2. The artist's genres (Artist.genres, an artist can have several tags, more precise than a single album genre) — a per-artist signal.

  If the signals agree, the sub-genre is used as is. On conflict: if the album tag is generic ("umbrella-like", such as rock/alternative/pop — Yandex's typical low-confidence default), the artist's genre wins; if the album tag is precise/specific (numetal, dnb, shanson), it wins, because it's more likely a genuine genre experiment by the artist rather than noise. This way the same artist with tracks of different character (say, a rock track and a punk track) ends up in different playlists instead of everything being lumped into one "main" genre.

  Sub-genre groups smaller than small_group_min (12 tracks by default, config.toml) collapse into the parent top-level bucket (Pop, Rock, Metal, Rap, Electronic, Jazz & Blues, Classical, Folk & World, Indie & Alternative, Soundtracks, Other) to avoid playlists with 1-2 tracks. Implementation — sort_ym/genres.py (classify_track, ROOT_BUCKET) — the root table is easy to extend if Yandex returns an unfamiliar root genre.

• Language is a hybrid:

  1. If the track has lyrics — the real language from the API (ru → RU, otherwise → INT).
  2. Otherwise — a genre-based hint (rusrap, shanson, bard, ...).
  3. Otherwise — an alphabet heuristic on the title/artist (Cyrillic/Latin).
  4. If nothing matched — the track goes into ... — Undetermined.

After report, the console also prints a list of unrecognized genres (that fell into "Other") so the table in sort_ym/genres.py can be extended.

Handy things

• Run apply first with --limit 20 --yes and check the result in the app before running it against all ~2000 tracks.
• Delays between requests are configured in config.toml ([throttle]).
• The minimum sub-genre playlist size is config.toml ([classify] small_group_min).

Risks (unofficial API)

There is no official API for personal Yandex Music library access — this tool uses the unofficial yandex-music library. The OAuth token in .token grants full access to your Yandex account — keep it local and never publish it. The tool only performs safe actions (reading likes, creating playlists, adding tracks) and never deletes anything.

For developers

Python 3.11+, yandex-music==3.0.0, standard library (tomllib, csv, unicodedata).

.venv\Scripts\python -m pytest tests/ -v
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym auth
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym fetch
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym report
.venv\Scripts\python -m sort_ym apply --limit 20 --yes

Code structure and data flow are in ARCHITECTURE.md.

Credits

Andrew Pimenov

License

MIT License