ytplailist/SETUP.md

Browser Authentication Setup

This guide will help you extract the necessary authentication cookies from your browser to use with ytmusicapi.

Step 1: Open YouTube Music

1. Open your browser (Chrome or Firefox)
2. Navigate to https://music.youtube.com
3. Make sure you are logged in to your Google account

Step 2: Open Developer Tools

• Chrome/Edge: Press F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows/Linux) / Cmd+Option+I (Mac)
• Firefox: Press F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows/Linux) / Cmd+Option+I (Mac)

Step 3: Go to Network Tab

1. Click on the "Network" tab in Developer Tools
2. If you don't see it, look for it in the tabs at the top of the developer tools panel

Step 4: Capture Network Requests

1. Refresh the page (press F5 or Ctrl+R / Cmd+R)
2. Wait for the page to load completely
3. Look for requests to music.youtube.com in the network list

Step 5: Find the Right Request

1. Click on any request that goes to music.youtube.com
2. Look for requests like:
   • browse
   • getBrowse
   • search
   • Or any request that shows music.youtube.com in the URL

Step 6: Copy Headers

1. With a request selected, click on the "Headers" tab
2. Scroll down to "Request Headers" section
3. You need to copy the following headers:

Required Headers:

• Cookie - A long string starting with something like VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=...
• User-Agent - Something like Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)...

Optional but Recommended:

• X-Goog-AuthUser - Usually 0 or 1
• Accept - Usually */* or application/json
• Accept-Language - Your language preference
• Content-Type - Usually application/json
• x-origin - Usually https://music.youtube.com

Step 7: Create browser.json

Create a file named browser.json in this directory with the following structure:

{
    "User-Agent": "PASTE_YOUR_USER_AGENT_HERE",
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "X-Goog-AuthUser": "0",
    "x-origin": "https://music.youtube.com",
    "Cookie": "PASTE_YOUR_COOKIE_HERE"
}

Replace:

• PASTE_YOUR_USER_AGENT_HERE with the User-Agent header value you copied
• PASTE_YOUR_COOKIE_HERE with the Cookie header value you copied

Important: The Cookie value is very long and contains sensitive information. Keep this file private and never commit it to version control.

Step 8: Verify

Your browser.json should look something like this (with your actual values):

{
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "Accept": "*/*",
    "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "X-Goog-AuthUser": "0",
    "x-origin": "https://music.youtube.com",
    "Cookie": "VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=abc123...; YSC=xyz789...; [many more cookie values]"
}

Troubleshooting

• Can't find the Cookie header? Make sure you're looking at a request to music.youtube.com, not youtube.com
• Authentication fails? Your cookies may have expired. Repeat the process to get fresh cookies
• Still having issues? Try using a different request from the network tab, or refresh the page and try again

Security Note

The browser.json file contains your authentication cookies. Anyone with access to this file can access your YouTube Music account. Keep it secure and never share it publicly.