While Beats Music will soon be owned by Apple, the music service does not easily integrate with iTunes. For instance, there is no official Beats tool to link your iTunes library for streaming from Beats Music. However, an unofficial tool called Beats Importer is a temporary solution that seems to work well for adding iTunes and Rdio Playlists to your Beats Music library. We’ve compiled a tutorial for importing your iTunes Playlists to Beats Music, below:
Step 1: Go to www.beatsimporter.com.
Step 2: Login to your Beats Music account via the “Connect to Beats” button.
Step 3: Create an iTunes XML file of an individual Playlist. To do this, go to the left side of your iTunes Player, right click on the name of a Playlist, and click the Export option.
Step 4: In the Export menu, be sure to save the file in the XML format. You should save it to your Desktop for easy access from the Beats Importer website.
Step 5: Select the XML file you just created via the iTunes import section on the Beats Import website. Click Submit. Provide a Playlist name for Beats. Select the XML file from your Desktop again. Click Submit again.
Step 6: The iTunes Playlist, after a few minutes of rendering through the Beats Importer website, should show up in your Beats Music library. Some testers are reporting mixed results, but the process worked well in my own tests. So, your milage may vary.
Other Music Services: For those who use Rdio or other music services, the website allows you to import public Rdio Playlists by entering your username or you can import CSV files. Beats Importer says that it is working on solutions for importing songs from both Spotify and Grooveshark to Beats Music.
While this (beta) solution seems to work (at least for now), Apple and Beats should work together on making a more fluid iTunes import experience. If the music market is moving to a streaming model and if Apple is investing heavily in the future of its music business, it should create an easy-to-use solution for its customers to move to Beats Music streaming as well. The Apple acquisition of Beats is planned to close in Q4 of this year, so hopefully the two companies have a solution ready around that time.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
And, yet, Apple still won’t let me consolidate multiple iTunes accounts because “it’s not technically feasible”.
Why in the world would ANYONE move from Rdio to Beats? Rdio just does so much right that Beats and Spotify fails on. I wish apple would have bought Rdio instead. Their apps and features are just extremely polished. I tried to like Beats, then Spotify won me back with their new way of collecting music, but i ended up being unhappy with how you have to drill down from Artists and it just shows a big list of songs instead of then seeing the albums by that artist. Moved over to Rdio and haven’t looked back. The remote control function on Rdio is amazing too.
I been an radio user for 2 years. Love the service but 2 weeks ao started using beats and the curated playlist recommendation are simply wonderful. I switched from radio to beats and i don’t think I’m going back.
I lost interest on both spotify and radio when i am listening to folk music radio and some stupid trance song comes along to kill my vibe.
I’m with you, Nate. I’m a Lala and MOG refugee. After those services were shut down, I did my homework and landed at Rdio. It’s better than Spotify, and Beats, well, that service doesn’t deserve consideration at this point. It’s awful.
Great post. Very useful.
Mark.. Thanks for the press! As you stated in the article it’s still beta.. So apologies to any users who had issues today (I know a few did). One was that there is a 500 song limit for a playlist on the Beats side.. Quite a few folks hit that and I have a fix to upload shortly so check back soon. . Feel free to comment here (I’ll keep an eye on it) or thru the site (my email address is there). Thanks again Mark!
i reckon Apple would have this function in the near future, no?
So Spotify just released a new Web API today.. I spent a few hours coding and got it working.. Needs more testing (and better UX) but I didn’t want to make people wait any longer.. it’s live on BeatsImporter.
Comments, issues, suggestions and general rants are all appreciated..
Gary
Just thought I’d let folks know that I expanded the Spotify feature.. You can now transfer playlists that you subscribe to.. Things like Spotify’s Top100, friend’s playlists etc.. as always comments are appreciated
how do I transfer playlists from beats to spotify?
Ryan.. I started to add the feature to http://beatsimporter.com/ I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet but if you contact me via the site and send me a few of your beats playlists I’ll convert them to CSV and you can use a Spotify importer to get them into Spotify..