Automating My Apple Music Library Export

Two years ago I wrote a parser that pulls fun insights out of my Apple Music library and generates my Music Listening page. The pipeline worked well but it had an annoying manual step: I had to open Music.app, click File > Library > Export Library, navigate to the right directory, and save the XML file before running the script. It was enough friction that I’d forget to do it for months.

The automation

Apple Music doesn’t expose a “library export” command in its AppleScript dictionary, so the only option is GUI scripting through System Events. The script:

1. Activates Music.app
2. Navigates the menu: File > Library > Export Library…
3. Uses Cmd+Shift+G in the save dialog to jump to the project directory
4. Clicks Save
5. Waits for the ~46MB XML file to finish writing (by polling file size until it stabilizes)
6. Runs the existing update_music Ruby script to regenerate the page
7. Commits any changes to blog/ and assets/ and pushes to deploy

./utilities/export_and_update_music

The interesting part was discovering that Music.app opens a standalone window "Save" rather than the more common sheet 1 of window 1 pattern that most macOS apps use for save dialogs. That small difference was the only real debugging needed.

Running it on a schedule

Since GUI scripting requires a logged-in session with screen access, a plain cron job won’t work. Instead, I’m using a launchd agent with LimitLoadToSessionType: Aqua, which ensures it only fires when I’m actually at my Mac.

<key>LimitLoadToSessionType</key>
<string>Aqua</string>

It runs weekly on Sunday mornings. Unlike cron, launchd with StartCalendarInterval will fire a missed job on wake, so if my laptop was sleeping during the scheduled time, it catches up as soon as I open the lid.

The other launchd gotcha: the agent runs with a minimal environment, not your shell profile. I had to set PATH (to find Homebrew’s Ruby and bundle) and LANG (to en_US.UTF-8, since the plist parser chokes on non-ASCII track metadata without it) in the plist’s EnvironmentVariables.

Requirements

The prerequisite is granting Accessibility permissions (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility). When running from a terminal, your terminal app needs the permission. When running via launchd, /usr/bin/env needs it instead. Since the script’s shebang uses #!/usr/bin/env bash, env is the parent process that macOS checks for Accessibility access.

The full script is in the repo.