Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Yeah, playlist radio is being discontinued, and doesn't work through the API anyway. "Create Similar Playlist" works pretty well, and I think doesn't use (or need) previous listening.

Adding a song to several playlists at once has made my life easier. Thanks, glenn - I assume it was you who made the call.

If it's a new feature you like, then I was definitely personally responsible for it.

Just discovered two very interesting Spotify tools for reordering playlists. Both are aimed at automating the process of creating a playlist that flows well.

One is https://www.sortbytune.com, which gives you a lot of control - you can drag tracks about and see how adjacent tracks match in various ways (harmonics, energy, that kind of thing), or you can just click on the Reorder button and let it for you, prioritising whatever qualities you want.

Other is https://spotfire.io, which just does the whole thing with one click as it thinks best, no parameters to choose from.

And of course, you can save the results as a new playlist rather than it overwriting the original.

Quite fun just throwing Release Radar or Discover Weekly at it - never sure if Spotify does anything with the order of those, but it definitely flows better to my ears. I used to use another tool (http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com/) just to reorder by ascending energy, but this is better.

Also interested in seeing how it would reorder classic albums.

Weird to have my 30-track Discover Weekly playlist come in at a brisk 57 minutes this week. Nothing like that ever happened before.

Third week in a row I've had mostly 1-2min tracks! 67min, 81min and 60min total.

Mine had a 22:54 track this week, so the contraction of the human spirit definitely isn't complete yet, but I'll pass these reports along to the right team...

My Discover Weekly was just You Suffer (But Why?) by Napalm Death repeated 500 times.

I wasn’t complaining, it was nice to hear all of it in one hit for once.

Ha, mine comes in at a relatively epic 1hr47, but still half are under 3 minutes.

Just discovered two very interesting Spotify tools for reordering playlists. Both are aimed at automating the process of creating a playlist that flows well.

One is https://www.sortbytune.com, which gives you a lot of control - you can drag tracks about and see how adjacent tracks match in various ways (harmonics, energy, that kind of thing), or you can just click on the Reorder button and let it for you, prioritising whatever qualities you want.

Other is https://spotfire.io, which just does the whole thing with one click as it thinks best, no parameters to choose from.

These are cool, thanks! One thing I'd like to see from tools like these is an ability to recognize and sort by genre. Sort by Tune uses some criteria that can act as proxies for genre, like acousticness or danceability, but I wish you could also layer on the Every Noise at Once dataset.

For instance, I have a playlist of 300+ songs from 1995, across a bunch of different genres, that I've been wanting to sequence in a way that flows nicely. I've made a bunch of other playlists like this, and it can be kind of laborious. Spotfire isn't much help, because the main thing it prioritizes is the song's key, so it has, like, Elastica going into Goodie Mob because both are in E-flat (or whatever). Sort by Tune is a little better, because you can customize it to put more value on "sound" and "energy," for instance, but it still ends up with some weird genre juxtapositions. So, I think I'll still have to do some manual sequencing on the macro level, to figure out how to move from Genre A to Genre Z, but Sort by Tune could probably help on the micro level to arrange songs within a specific genre.

Yeah, I've not really found a tool that's really good at sorting by genre.

There's http://organizeyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com, which will split everything by glenn's microgenres (so you get extract all the 'permanent wave' or 'laboratorio' tracks) but what you really want is something that treats these genres in a fuzzier way. Maybe the closest I've found to want you want is https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-analyzer, from which you can filter a playlist to parent-level genres like rock and R&B, and save the results to a new playlist. But you'd have to do those genres one by one, rather than sorting them all into chunks in a single playlist.

I like mixing up genres in playlists myself, to a certain extent.

Oh actually it looks like https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-sorter/ lets you sort a playlist by parent genre. Though it just failed when I tried throwing my 6,000+ liked songs at it.

Playing an album on phone app to Sonos speaker and it just gets confused, either playing the next track without updating to reflect this on the phone (or the browser version) or just stopping altogether. Happens quite often.

Based on my experience with sonos i'd put this one on them. ymmv but i'll put the advice i got from them in the sonos thread anyway.

Spotify Connect is brilliant when it works but half the time when I try to move playback from my Mac to my Sonos speakers it fails. Workaround seems to be moving it first to my phone and then on to speaker from there. Probably Sonos's fault, yeah. Can always Airplay it instead but that's not as good.

Or, not 'moving it phone' as such - opening Spotify on my phone and grabbing it from there.

I'm still finding that transferring a queue from the desktop to my phone doesn't always work. Think its happening less frequently than it was at some earlier point, possibly an older phone. But can think its transfered then find the thing I'm listening to crashing and queue I'd just set up disappearing.
Wondering if external signal crashing due to weather caused this last week when i had been listening to something I was getting through cable.
I like flexibility of having gone without creating an actual playlist but may be behind with the app.

I'm assuming there's no easy way to merge two folders?

Folder merging tool: nope.

alas

getting a fun notification when i add a song to a playlist: "feedback.added-to-playlist-specific"

I've been getting that intermittently too. The song is added to the correct playlist, it seems.

Like to play some local files? Hope you enjoy a fraction of a second of each track in sequence and then an error message. It will probably work on the third try. Probably.

Noticing that tracks from KLF's Solid State Logik 2 can be played on the album page but not in a playlist. Pretty ludicrous.

Uh, I don't have any problem playing those songs from album or playlist, and there's no feature where certain things can't be played from playlists...

Third week in a row I've had mostly 1-2min tracks! 67min, 81min and 60min total.

So funny that this is still going on. My median today is 2m33s. Good selection though

Got a copyright infringement notice on the art I was using for a private playlist, which is a first.

At some point in the early 21st century, Radiohead became something more than a band: they became a touchstone for everything that is fearless and adventurous in rock

I'm no longer sure I know what "touchstone" means.

It's like a red pill but you absorb it through the skin

This may be just me, but lately whenever I randomly search for playlists based on a keyword, it's pretty much only giving me "official" Spotify playlists. It may give me one or two user-generated playlists, but that's it, which is very different from my past experiences. Is anyone else noticing this or is it just me?

I have really enjoyed finding interesting playlists then clicking the creator to see what else they have put together, seems like those days may be dwindling in Spotify at least.

noticed it too - also noticed yesterday when searching for a rainy day 70s playlist that there was... a rainy day 70s playlist MADE FOR ME :O

kinda cool

You can use my research tools to get unpersonalized playlist results, and lots of them...

https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=playlist&name=hyperpop

Hi Glenn,

I've noticed in recent weeks that your New Releases by Genre page seems to have significantly fewer items than in the past. Have you made changes to how this works?

We made some big changes back in April. There aren't fewer things, but the categorization is a lot less fuzzy now, so each genre is more accurate and each release appears in fewer genres. So if you've been following only specific genres, you might want to recalibrate and add a few more to catch things that previously might have drifted into different ones.

Good to know! It does indeed seem to be a bit more spread out now.

Really enjoying the slight lag on the desktop program so that when you go to delete a playlist, just as you click the menu suddenly readjusts itself and you end up downloading the playlist instead.

There should definitely be a law requiring pop-up menus to be built completely before display.

Hmm, I can't make that menu readjust, though. What's the exact shift you're seeing?

another odd thing I've noticed is that when I do song radio for things like techno tracks, the radio playlist comes up with a ton of one minute long tracks

Really enjoying the slight lag on the desktop program

Has become really sluggish for me on my M1 Mac in last few days too. Can't be an update as I'm still on an old version cause I don't have admin access on this work machine.

So this AI DJ thing just plays basically the same tracks each time you try it out? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

THey still keep messing around with elements of the design for no reason . Keep messing around with how long a queue you can have , changing number by one or 2. Seems to be a bit of a weird thing to do. Is there a reason, is having a lot on a queue on my computer affecting anybody else. Would have thought things would be more autonomous per computer .

The DJ isn't meant to repeat itself like that, not sure why it is for you...

i'm also getting the "very short songs" thing in my artist radio! listened to "only for tonight" by TERR and (nearly) every song after was like 1 or 2 minutes long. strange!

Yeah, I'm not a fan, especially since I'm specifically looking for songs that are more like 6 minutes long.

fuck this garbage company forever

“Spotify has already learned that there’s no money to be made with exclusive rights to superstar offerings. “After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect,” explains tech journalist David Pierce, “it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches.”
The more profitable move is to manipulate listeners—prodding them to choose music the platform can use without royalty payments. As far as I can tell, this is the single biggest advantage to AI music. It’s a cheap alternative.”

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/nobody-will-tell-you-the-ugly-reason

"well, mainstreaming a fascist podcast didn't work, guess we need to force-feed our user base all the royalty-free music we can dig up or create"