Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Is there a way to *limit* the size of these playlists? I'm going to speak in metaphors, which I'm sure isn't particularly helpful, but something with a higher concentrated essence of the original source track but less diluted across, say, 250 tracks?

I guess I'm thinking a, say, Labradford playlist, only 20 tracks long but hyper-focused on the original sound would be less unwieldy?

Question for curators of large playlists - is there any way to "insert" a song in a particular spot? I've got playlists with thousands of songs, and if I want to make a new addition, say, number 4 on the playlist of 4000, there doesn't seem to be any way to do this other than adding it to the bottom of the list and then dragging it up for a good 1-2 minutes. There's got to be a better way!

sorry, power user feature, only 1% will use it, not worthwhile, NEXT

“Same artist but different song” link looks amazing, ty

In the Spotify desktop app, which is the only way any serious playlist editing should be done, you can drag a song over to a playlist on the sidebar and hover there for a second, and that playlist will appear on the right so you can keep dragging into a specific spot. Or you can select a track wherever, Copy it, go to your target playlist, select the track that you want this one to appear after, and Paste.

I do have alternate versions of this Canonical Path idea that are based on individual songs, or albums, but the datasets are more unwieldy than the artist-based ones for multiple reasons.

Glenn, the copy/paste works perfectly - thanks!

“4050kced” ft. Sextile - crazy to fake a song with such a small band but it did get the scammer in my new release playlist.

milo on that note, i just got a new release notification for "de la soul and uk projects"- https://open.spotify.com/album/3dFn9TqBVYkVr2FYutmqR1?si=BRNbGyUaRIuFU6gUS3wRCw&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A3dFn9TqBVYkVr2FYutmqR1

it's nothing whatsoever to do with de la.

So now there's a 'Use Compact Library layout' setting which will give you the old playlists view cool cool.

I have an update version waiting to load to my computer. Hadn't really thought about it but this morning I wondered if it was likely to have messed up any further.
Hadn't let it install cos I've been listening through a queue when around the computer. & that queue has been being added to and reordered etc.

I just accidentally hit Enhanced Shuffle and it kind of freaked me out a bit.

that same artist different song thing is very cool!

Stupid new interface: further shittery

Still won't create new folders, and now when attempting to move playlists around it commits suicide and blanks the entire playlist window, making everything unavailable.
https://i.ibb.co/n7fwRSm/Untitled.png]

God I hate this update.

the desktop update is unfathomably bad. i didnt like the old UI either but this went backwards about 500 steps from that.

It's ok I'm sure they'll find something worse to do shortly. Rapid action setting of firing things at the wall to see what sticks like.
It's only been like no time since they made the last design brain fart.so I'm sure they'll do it again soon.

Listening to an ambient playlist and it's weird to see all these artists listed who have several hundred thousand monthly listeners and zero presence anywhere online except Spotify.

wasn't there a big exposé that a lot of those artists are either AIs or employed by spotify to churn out stuff to populate those playlists so they don't have to pay artist royalties?

No. They're probably mostly pseudonyms for musicians who do other non-background music, but they're neither AI nor employed by Spotify.

ambient is a surprisingly popular genre

combined spotify streams for tracks on Eno's Apollo album abt 300 million

My impression is that a lot of people use Spotify almost exclusively as background music for work or sleep, so it's not too surprising that ambient and "lo fi beats to study to" are big genres.
Of all the music I listen to, my end if year summary often places video game soundtracks and fan heater noise loops in my most listened

wasn't there a story from the height of grunge's popularity that a number of the artists involved in the Seattle scene were also working in Muzak which was also Seattle based.

2023: The Year Ambient Broke

floated, big bag of floatation

Glenn, is there any way to filter/search a playlist for grayed-out songs? A search operator maybe? Looking to periodically check large playlists for grays to see if there's an alternate version of the song, etc.

No, not currently.

first it insists upon recommending me podcasts -which i absolutely do not care about whatsoever- and to add an insult on top of that, it's started recommending one called "432 hz nusic." lol fuck off.

*music

tho i wouldn't be surprised if it was nusic. take that hokum over to tidal or whatever

I've moved over to Tidal last year (as they allow streaming in DJ software, Spotify doesn't anymore), and the Tidal apps are terribly basic, but it's at least good to see that it's still not that great either in the green camp.

No matter how often you close the intrusive new right-hand window of artist info, it will always reappear.

For some reason Spotify started inserting a track or even a podcast in front of what i was in the middle of listening to as i transferred between devices. Id be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly be listening to something completely unrelated. Not sure if its still doing that but happened several times. Ho hum.

Seems bad: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7zz9z/spotify-rogan-rfk-vaccine-misinformation-policy

Terrible

it's ok they know who is grifting and who is just roganomics

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/19/spotify-executive-calls-harry-and-meghan-grifters-after-podcast-deal-ends

Yes please, I would love an intrusive 'now playing' window to open every time I click on a new track, and for it to have barely a single piece of useful or relevant information in it.

They need to redeploy every idiot who works on “improving” the UI to fixing up metadata or something else useful.

I only realised recently that they have the ability to launch a video window for some podcasts. So found that things i was listening to thinking they were audio only because they were here as podcasts actually had a pop up window I hadn't seen because in the middle of doing something else. & having multiple windows open. Have come across it a few times now. Is taht something that was always there or a recent addition.

Yes please, I would love an intrusive 'now playing' window to open every time I click on a new track, and for it to have barely a single piece of useful or relevant information in it.

I'm very probably being dense, but is there a 'make similar playlist' function in Everynoise? I'm sure I've used it before but... (I know there's one within Spotify in the right-click menu' but I like the expansivity of the Everynoise version.)

by make similar playlist, do you mean a radio playlist? if so, I believe that is here:

https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=radio

Depends on how "similar" you mean, but if you put a playlist into https://everynoise.com/playlistprofile.cgi you can get a link at the bottom to make a playlist with the same artists but different tracks. I have an Spotify-internal version that does more of an extrapolation to different artists, which is probably more like what you have in mind, but it requires data access below the API level...

I like the radio option, Moodles, but that is just extrapolated from a single track eh - I was thinking more as Glenn says: a playlist of (relatively) similar mood/genre tags and then extrapolate from there.

Out of interest, how does the one built into the context menu work Glenn - as in the 'create a similar playlist' function? Does that build from user data?

radio can be based on tracks, artists, albums, or playlists

I get a Python script error when I put a playlist link in there? Works OK with artist and track.

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.