a blog about music technology by Paul Lamere
Update: things have changed! You still don t need a Save to Playlist but it no longer hurts. Read about the new behavior in this reddit post: Nevermind. Go ahead and use Save To Playlist! One of the most common points of confusion in SmarterPlaylists is around saving. It s completely logical to assume that if you re [ ]
SmarterPlaylists launched on July 25, 2015 as a side project — a visual programming tool that let anyone wire together Spotify sources, filters, and combiners to build playlists that no single Spotify feature could create on its own. No ads, no business model, no growth team. Just a tool I thought was cool, shared on [ ]
If you used the original SmarterPlaylists, your programs are still out there — and now you can bring them into the new system. How it works When you log in, you ll see an Import tab if you have legacy programs. This gives you a browsable list of all your old programs with metadata like run count, last [ ]
Like any other programming environment, SmarterPlaylists needs to help its programmers debug their programs, otherwise, the only debugging tool will have is thinking. And that s often not good enough. With this in mind, I ve pushed out an update to SmarterPlaylists that gives you detailed info on your run including: how many API calls were made [ ]
Hey everyone — SmarterPlaylists is back online at smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com As some of you know, the old version went offline a while back due to Spotify s API auth changes. Rather than patch the old system, I ve done ground-up rewrite with a modern stack. What works: What s missing: What about my old programs? I still have the old [ ]
Sort Your Music has been helping people sort their Spotify playlists since 2012. Millions of playlists later, the app just got its first major rewrite. The core idea is the same — pick a playlist, sort by tempo or energy or danceability, save it back — but pretty much everything else is new. Why Now? [ ]
I ve been lurking in the live coding world for a few years. I ve been re-inspired by Strudel. It s a no-install javascript-centric version of Tidal Cycles that fits into my brain better than the Haskell-derived Tidal every did. I ll be posting some of my experiments at Music Machinery on the Bear Blog.
I fondly recall the Google Reader days when lots of folks were reading long form content. With the demise of Google Reader, and the rise of Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, long form content drifted into the background. But it may be coming back, thanks at least in part, to Substack. I m going to give Substack [ ]
I ve been reading blogs seemingly forever. I ve read lots of great posts .. but there s one blog post that I still think about all the time even though it is nearly 5 years old. It s by Sascha Judd and its all boy bands and the diversity crisis in tech. It s a must read: How The [ ]
A few months ago, we finally shutdown the final remnants of the old Echo Nest infrastructure. One of casualties of this final shutdown was the archive of my old blog Duke Listens! that I authored while I was a researcher at Sun Labs. However, I did manage to have a backup sitting on an old [ ]