"turn any text into an interactive playlist" #spotify

Music Given my generally cynical demeanour lately, something has to be really, really impressive to inspire awe.

Hello, Playlistify.org

This Spotify playlist tool was mentioned here but mostly there at about March time because of its ability to convert itunes lists for Spotify making them shareable.

Look a bit closer and there is also something rather magical.

Visit Playlistify.org

Click the "bake your playlist" button.

This releases a box with a bunch of tabbing options at the top, brand names like iTunes, Last.fm, Spotify etc.

And cut and paste. Click that.

New box, more words:

"turn any text into an interactive playlist"

If you have a list of songs with artists names next to them as cleanly as possible, it searches for each one on Spotify and spits out a playlist at the end.

So, if there's a film you quite like, you can visit the imdb, find the soundtrack listing, clean it up a bit so that each line only has the track name and artist on it, plug it into Playlistify and a few minutes later a compilation is generated.

Like this one for Almost Famous.

As you can see it's not perfect (what is?). If it can't find the track or there are some quirks in the list it'll try to find the nearest option.

Cameron Crowe did not choose MC Bounds for his 70s rock opus, and in terms of this example, because the actual soundtrack itself isn't on Spotify, there is no Stillwater.

Now and then it'll choose a cover by session artists over the original, although in the case of the Fleetwood Mac track here, it's because for all the Mac music on Spotify, "Future Games" isn't part of the selection.

So some post-search editing is required if you care about such things.

From here we reach the a few stumbling blocks. Because there are always stumbling blocks.

Firstly, once the list has been generated it asks for a few details, title of list tags, description, which is fine, then location details and user name and a social network.

Then on the playlist page, the "open in Spotify" button doesn't open in Spotify. You have to create a playlist in the music player then copy and paste the track details over, which is bit fiddly.

But in comparison to having to search for each track separately which I did when I was curating some of these old playlists, that's as nothing.

Plus it seems to work even if you just type in any old thing, if you are worried about privacy and whatnot.

I generated this Now That's What I Call somewhat disappointing 42 playlist in about three minutes by copying over the tracks from the Wikipedia.

It even works for just lists of artists names, though as you can see the results are distinctly oddball.

Hours of fun, I'm sure you'll agree.