One of the problems with working at a company like Spotify is that my Spotify account gets filled up with all sorts of work-related playlists. Over the last few years I’ve built lots of apps that create playlists. When I test these apps I end up generating lots of playlists that I will never ever listen to. If I were a tidy soul, I’d clean up my playlists after ever project, but, alas, that is something I never do. The result is that after working at Spotify for a year (and using Spotify for 8 years), I’ve accumulated many hundreds of garbage playlists. Now I could go into the Spotify desktop client and clean these up, but in the current client there’s no good way to bulk delete playlists. Each playlist delete takes at least 3 clicks. The prospect of doing this hundreds of times to clean up the playlist garbage is a bit overwhelming.
I had a few hours to kill in a coffeeshop yesterday so I decided to deal with my playlist mess. I wrote a little Spotify web app called The Unfollower that lets you unfollow any of your playlists with a single click. If you change your mind, you can re-follow any playlist that you unfollow.
The Unfollower uses the Spotify Web API to make it all happen. In particular it relies on the Follow/Unfollow API that was recently added by the API team.
If you are like me and have lots of dead playlists clogging up your Spotify, and you are looking for a streamlined way of cleaning them up, give The Unfollower a try.
Music Machinery 
#1 by david talbot on April 17, 2015 - 11:11 pm
Hi Paul,
this is a bit off topic but something you might be interested in.
I listen to 1500 of my favourites songs in one playlist like a jukebox on my Sandisk Sansa e200 player. I shuffled the order and saved the playlist.
But as I listen to this playlist everyday I started to notice some artists with many songs e.g. The Beatles total is 150, would play too soon e.g. 3 songs apart.
To remedy this I manually went through the Sansa player playlist and put each The Beatles song evenly spaced (every 10 songs). As you might imagine this was a laborious task.
Since I am increasing my favourite songs from 1500 to about 4500 I want to do the above for all the artists with say more than 20 songs, but I cannot find any software that has ‘even distribution’ as a method or option in playlist management.
My only options as I see it are:
1. Create playlist in Media Monkey or Window Media Player and manually move songs.
2. Use a text editor to edit a M3U playlist file and use the ‘go to’ line number function to move songs.
Both options are pretty slow and repetitive.
If you have any ideas let me know.
Thanks,
David.
#2 by david talbot on April 18, 2015 - 12:27 am
Hi Paul,
I have found a solution. There is a music player called AIMP which has a plugin called Ultramix which distributes artists evenly in playlists.
I didn’t want to waste your time so I thought I would let you know.
Thanks,
David.
#3 by timvernimmen on April 25, 2015 - 7:26 pm
As a matter of fact, in the current desktop client there’s no good way to do anything. Could you please build a better one?