Homeoke

Can you use Apple Music or Spotify songs in another app?

The short answer is no, and the reason is not the app you are trying to use. It is worth understanding, because it is the same answer everywhere and because there are three practical ways around it, only one of which costs anything.

A subscription is a licence to listen, not a file

When you download a song for offline listening, something really does land on your phone. It is not a file you can open. It is wrapped so that only that service's own app can play it, and every other app on the phone sees a track it is not allowed to touch.

That is how Apple Music works, and Spotify, and YouTube Music, and the rest of them. It is not one company being awkward. It is the deal that lets you pay a monthly fee for everything instead of buying songs one at a time, and the wrapper is the part that makes the deal possible.

So when a singing app, a video editor or a DJ app asks you for a song and your whole library lives in a subscription, you are going to get the same result each time. In Homeoke an Apple Music track simply will not import, and since it is the first thing most people try, it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you find out.

Bought is different from subscribed

The line is not Apple against everyone else. It is buying against subscribing.

• A song you bought is an ordinary file. Anything from the iTunes Store since 2009, or from Bandcamp, Qobuz, Beatport or an artist's own site, comes without a wrapper. It is yours, it can sit in Files or iCloud Drive, and any app can open it.
• A CD you own, ripped, is a file the same way. So is anything somebody sent you.
• A song inside a subscription is not a file, however many times you have played it and however long you have been paying.

One test settles it in about five seconds. Can you find the song in the Files app? If you can, every app on the phone can use it. If it only exists inside the service's own app, then no other app can, and no setting anywhere will change that.

Why this bites harder for singing than for listening

Taking the original singer out of a recording means running the actual audio through a model, and in Homeoke that happens on the phone. There is no server it could send the song to instead, on purpose. So a song the app cannot open is a song it cannot separate, and no amount of permission granting gets around it. The audio is the input. Without it there is nothing to work on.

Three things you can do instead

1. Bring a file

Buy the one track. It is cheap, it is yours permanently, it works in every app you will ever own, and for a song you are going to spend weeks getting right that is a fair trade. This is the option that gives you everything: the backing, the key change, the words and a recording of yourself.

2. Sing to the words now, and add the audio later

Under Add song there is a door called Lyrics only. Paste an Apple Music or Spotify share link into it, or just type the artist and the title. It takes the two names, finds the words in time with the music, and keeps the song in your library with them attached.

That gives you a song you can mark up, so you can work out where the hard bars are and where the words actually fall, and you can sing it right through with nothing behind you. Less strange than it sounds, and it is how a lot of learning a song happens anyway. If the catalogue does not have the song, you can paste the words in yourself. The audio can arrive any time later.

3. Record what's playing

Also under Add song. Put the phone near the speaker, start it, and play the song from whichever app you were going to play it from. The room recording becomes the song's audio, and because the separation runs on whatever the song's audio is, you get a backing out of it, and your own voice separated from it as well.

The limits are real and worth knowing before you judge it. This is a microphone in a room, so a quiet room with the phone near one speaker is the case that works. A gym, a bar or a car gives you a recording that helps you remember which song you meant, and not much more, because separation pulls voices out of music and does not remove noise. Nothing identifies the song for you either, so you need to know its name before the words can be found.

What you are allowed to do with any of it

Singing along at home, to music you have paid to listen to, is the ordinary private use that copyright has always left alone. Publishing a recording is a different question with a different answer, and the answer depends on where you live and on the rights holder.

Recording a room does not move either half of that line. It is still your own listening in your own house, and it is still not a licence to put the result online. Worth knowing before you upload anything, rather than after.