🧹 apple-music-cleaner

Bulk-remove your favorited tracks from Apple Music — or wipe your whole library — using the same private API the music.apple.com web player talks to. No paid Apple Developer account required.

Comes in two flavors, sharing one engine:

• Web app — npm run web, open localhost:3000, paste two tokens, click. It shows your library and does the deleting for you, with a live progress bar.
• CLI — same operations from the terminal, dry-run by default.

Un-favorite everything. Or wipe it all.

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Run this at your own risk

This tool works by using your own web-player session tokens to call a private, undocumented Apple API — the same one music.apple.com uses. It gets the job done, but it lives in a gray area, so a few honest notes:

• Deletions are permanent — no undo, no trash. A full wipe really does clear every playlist, album, music video, song and rating. The confirmation prompts are the only safety net.
• It's not the "official" way. Apple's terms expect you to use their own apps, so scripting your library like this isn't strictly sanctioned. For personal use on your own account this is low-stakes in practice, but it's your call and your account.
• Treat your tokens like a password. The media-user-token controls your whole library — don't share it or paste it anywhere you don't trust.

If you'd rather stay fully above board, the sanctioned paths are: Apple MusicKit with a paid Apple Developer account (it authorizes through Apple's own consent flow instead of copied tokens), intelligent playlists if you own a Mac, or manually deleting your 3,000 favorited songs one by one 💀. This project exists for the free, no-account, no-carpal-tunnel route; use it at your own risk.

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How it works

Apple Music "favorites" are stored as ratings (value: 1) in Apple's API. Un-favoriting is just deleting the rating (DELETE /v1/me/ratings/library-songs/{id}). Library items — songs, albums, playlists, music videos — each have their own deletion endpoint under /v1/me/library/….

The API needs two credentials, both of which your logged-in web-player session already holds:

Header	What it is	Lifetime
authorization	The web player's developer token (a JWT)	~6 months
media-user-token	Your personal session token	Long-lived

Apple's servers only accept requests originating from *.apple.com, so a plain browser page can't call the API directly. The web app gets around this with a tiny local Node server: your browser talks to it, and it relays the calls to Apple with the right origin. Your tokens travel only between your browser, your own server, and Apple — nothing is persisted anywhere.

Getting your two tokens

1. Open music.apple.com and sign in.
2. Open DevTools (F12, or ⌘⌥I on macOS) and select the Network tab.
3. Type amp-api in the filter box, then click around your Library until requests appear.
4. Click any request and find Request Headers:
   • authorization — copy everything after Bearer (a long string starting with eyJ).
   • media-user-token — copy the whole value.

Those are the two values both the web app and the CLI ask for.

Web app

Requires Node.js 20+.

git clone https://github.com/mpellouin/apple-music-cleaner
cd apple-music-cleaner
npm install
npm run web            # → http://localhost:3000

Then in your browser:

1. Connect — paste the two tokens. The app validates them locally and shows the JWT's expiry date.
2. Review — it loads your library and shows live counts: songs, albums, playlists, music videos, favorites (with an expandable track list).
3. Clean — either Remove all favorites, or Wipe entire library (which only arms after you type DELETE, then asks for a final confirmation). A progress bar and log track every deletion, and a summary reports anything that failed.

CLI usage

cp .env.example .env   # paste your two tokens in

Every command is a dry run by default — it lists what it found and deletes nothing until you add --execute.

# Remove the favorite rating from every favorited song
npm start                          # dry run: list favorites
npm start -- --execute             # actually remove them

# Wipe the entire library: playlists, albums, music videos, songs, ratings
npm start -- wipe                  # dry run: inventory only
npm start -- wipe --execute        # actually delete everything

Options: --playlist "<name>" targets a favorites playlist the auto-detection missed (names vary by locale); --scan forces a full library scan instead of using the Favorite Songs playlist.

What it can and cannot delete

Can: favorites, dislikes and other ratings (library- and catalog-level), library songs, albums, playlists, music videos.

Cannot:

• The system Favorite Songs playlist itself — Apple rejects that deletion server-side, so it just ends up empty (one "failure" there during a wipe is expected).
• Your listening/play history and recommendation profile — no API endpoints exist. Recommendations fade once your library is empty; Apple Support can hard-reset them on request.
• Purchases — purchased music stays tied to your Apple ID even after removal from the library view.

License

MIT — provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. You assume all risk.