Today I added a new SmarterPlaylists component. It has the catchy name playlist (abs date). It works similarly to the standard playlist component that sources tracks from a Spotify playlist, but it lets you order and filter the tracks based upon when they were added to the playlist. With playlist (abs date) you can specify that you want the tracks returned in normal playlist order, or in the order in which tracks were added to the playlist. You can also filter the tracks so that only tracks that were added between a range of dates are returned.
Here’s what the configuration looks like for the component:
Some possible use cases:
Let’s just listen to the most recent 20 tracks in my “Fav songs playlist”. To do this I add the Playlist (Abs Date) component, and configure it to read songs from Fav Songs and return them in date added order:
I then connect it up to a component that extracts the last 20 songs from its source:
Here’s a Valentine’s Day use case – you want to generate a romantic list of songs that you and your SO were listening to when you first started dating last summer. You can build a playlist of songs that you added to each of your fav songs playlist during that time like so:
where both Playlist (abs date) components are configured similarly:
This doesn’t handle all date related use cases yet. For instance, it’d be great if we could extract out songs from a playlist based upon a relative time scale … such as all the tracks that were added in the last week. Support for relative dates will be coming soon.
Music Machinery 