How to Download an Entire Smule Playlist in One Go

Playlists are how the Smule community groups its work — 'My best 2024 duets', 'Bollywood classics', 'Songs I want to remake'. If you're saving your own library or archiving someone whose voice you love, doing it one URL at a time is punishing. The browser extension solves this in a way the web tool can't.

Why the extension (not the web tool)?

The web tool grabs one URL at a time by design. Playlists load lazily — Smule only shows the first 10–20 items, and scrolling loads the next batch. A server-side scraper can't reproduce that infinite scroll (Smule's Cloudflare protection blocks bots), so the extension does it inside your own browser, where you're already authenticated as a normal user.

Installing the extension

1. 1Visit our Browser Extension page and click the big Download .zip button.
2. 2Unzip the file to a folder you'll keep (e.g. ~/Extensions/smule-downloader).
3. 3Open chrome://extensions (or edge://extensions, brave://extensions, etc.).
4. 4Turn on Developer mode with the toggle in the top-right corner.
5. 5Click 'Load unpacked' and select the unzipped folder.
6. 6Pin the Smule Downloader icon to your toolbar for easy access.

Downloading a full playlist

1. 1Open any Smule playlist URL (they look like smule.com/playlist/1234567_89012).
2. 2Wait 2–3 seconds while the extension auto-scrolls to the bottom and captures every performance.
3. 3Click the extension icon — the Playlist tab shows every track with singer, plays and love count.
4. 4Optionally search or sort (Most plays, Most loves, Title A→Z).
5. 5Click 'Queue all' to add everything to the download queue, or 'Queue' on individual tracks.
6. 6Switch to the Queue tab and hit 'Run queue' — the extension opens each recording in a background tab, grabs the CDN URL, downloads and closes.

Smart filenames

Enable 'Smart names' in Settings (on by default) and every download gets a proper filename built from the DOM metadata:

Exporting as M3U, CSV or JSON

Before you download, you can export the scraped playlist as:

• M3U — open directly in VLC, foobar2000 or iTunes to stream from Smule's CDN without downloading.
• CSV — import into Excel or Google Sheets to sort, filter, mail-merge or share with collaborators.
• JSON — machine-readable for scripts, personal backup tools, or feeding into your own database.

Handling very large playlists

Playlists over 500 tracks need a bit more patience. Best practice:

1. 1Scroll the playlist manually all the way to the bottom before opening the extension — that primes the extension's cache.
2. 2Use the search box to grab batches (e.g. only Hindi songs first, then English).
3. 3Split into smaller queues of 50–100 tracks. Chrome sometimes throttles background tabs beyond that.
4. 4Keep your laptop plugged in — sustained downloads eat battery.

FAQ