Music Machinery

Earlier this week I released the second alpha version of Smarter Playlists. This version of Smarter Playlists includes a scheduler that will let you schedule your programs to run periodically.  In this post, I walk through creating and scheduling a Smarter Playlist that will automatically archive your discover weekly tracks.

Step 1 -Login to Smarter Playlists

Go to Smarter Playlists and login with your Spotify Credentials.

Step 2 -Import the My Discover Weekly Archiver

Go to the Imports page and import the My Discover Weekly Archiver by clicking the Import button.

Step 3 – Edit the program

Ideally, you’d be able to just import the program and run it, but unfortunately, there’s no API (yet) that allows Smarter Playlists to find your Discover Weekly playlist, so you’ll have to customize the program with your own URIs.

Go to the Smarter Playlists Programs page, find the program called “import of My Discovery Weekly Archiver” and edit it (by clicking the edit button).

Step 3 – add your Discovery Weekly URI to the program

You have to add your own URIs to the program.  First, in the Spotify Client, browse to your Discover Weekly Playlist (you can get to it by clicking on ‘browse’ and then ‘discover’).  Right click on the playlist and Copy Spotify URI.

Now in your Discover Weekly Archiver, double click on the box labeled ‘Discovery Weekly’.  You’ll see the component editor page.  In the URI field, paste the URI for your Discover Weekly.

Step 4 – add your Discovery Weekly Archive URI to the program

Go back to Spotify and create the playlist that will be your archive.  Get its URI, head back to Smarter Playlists and add the URI to the My Discovery Weekly component, and the Save to Spotify component.

Step 5 – Test your program

Press the run button. If all goes well, you should see your Discovery Weekly Archive playlist populated with this week’s tracks.  If you run it again, you should see the same tracks (since we filter out any dups).

Step 6 – Schedule your program to run once a week.

Once you are convinced that your program is running properly, you can schedule it to run once a week.  To do this press the ‘schedule’ button next to your program to bring up the scheduler.

Click on the ‘How Often’ drop-down and select Every Week.   Set ‘How Many Times’ to an appropriate value (50 will back you up for a year). Click on Update Schedule  to make it happen.  If you want to schedule the program to run on a particular day of the week, click on the calendar button in the Next Run field to pick a particular date.

Once you do this, your program will run once a week to archive your discoveries.

Step 7 – Check the status of your runs

You can check the status of your scheduled runs and see if there are any errors just be visiting the Scheduler page for your program.

Going Deeper – how does the program work?

Read on if you are interested in learning how the archiver works.

The archiver is rather simple program. It consists of 4 components – 2 playlist components, a filter and a playlist saver.  The first playlist component reads in the current Discovery Weekly playlist. The second playlist component reads the contents of your current archive. These two playlists are input into the track filter, this only passes tracks through that are on the green stream that are not on the red stream. The result is that only tracks that are not currently in the archive are passed through.  These tracks are then sent on to the save to Spotify  component.  This component will write the input tracks to the given playlist.  This component has the append flag set so that it appends tracks to the archive instead of overwriting the archive.

Wrapping up

With all that URI copying I think it is still a bit too complex to set up a simple program like the discovery archiver. But as new APIs are added things should get simpler.