Sometimes you want to grab someones Spotify playlist for your Apple Music library, or export it to YouTube.

There are as many services for moving your music as there are streaming services.

And youll get the best results by using more than one of them at once.

All these apps are just a little different.

Some are desktop-only, some are mobile-only, and some support different second-tier streaming services.

But also, they all use slightly different methods to match songs.

So far, every service Ive used couldnt find every song on every playlist.

And every service occasionally picked the wrong match.

But all the services I write up aregood enough.

You could pick any one of them, manually fix their mistakes, and not be miserable.

And theyre all cheap or free.

Its very limited, supporting imports from Spotify or Apple Music, and exports to Apple Music or YouTube.

Houdini has a simple interface that lets you pick the source and destination and move multiple playlists at once.

The biggest drawback is that in my experience, Houdini tends to find remixes instead of originals.

Still, better a slight mismatch than no match.

Houdini only works on your phone, and only on an iPhone.

So youre gonna be poking around with your thumbs.

Houdini doesnt save unmatched tracks for later.

Houdini missed 13 tracks; Tune My Music missed 6.

But weirdly, TMM missed different tracks than Houdini did.

It matched a few tracksmoreprecisely, but those precise matches werent available to stream.

So for example, theCrazy Rich Asianssoundtrack features a 1985 Sally Yeh cover/adaptation of Madonnas Material Girl.

TMM found the version that you cant stream.

But Houdini found the original release of the Yeh track, on Yehs album.

And thats perfectly streamable.

See, things get really complicated, and these services have to make a lot of choices.

And here, Houdinis near match was more useful than TMMs exact match.

Because each service missed different tracks, I was able to cobble together theCrazy List Asiansplaylist through both sources.

And as with Houdini, youll need to check for false matches.

Those seem pretty inevitable if youre transferring anything but the most basic music.

Is all this effort worth what you save by not buying music?