How do you organise your playlists/library?

[nemof]

Hi there all.

So, as the subject says, how do you organise your playlists?

I find spotify's ability to manage playlist incredibly subpar, and I don't believe they're about to do anything about it soon, instead focusing on crappy social features, rather than the, you know, music. Anyhow...

I want to know what you do to organise your music. I add new albums frequently to my library, but have not come up with any rational way to organise it.

are there any third party tools for working with your spotify playlists and doing advanced find/replace/update/moving? eg, it would be great to merge playlists based on a filter.

how do you organise a lot of albums which are unrelated and you don't want to craft a specific playlist?

and as an addendum, what do you think spotify should do to make it easier to manage large amounts of albums/playlists/collections of music?

[Peter__]

I am holding out hope the collections feature will be an improvement on the current system. 

Peter

[Rollo_]

@nemof 

• Artist discography playlists
• Some partial discogs and single album playlists
• Weekly New Release playlists [sourced from http://spotimy.co.uk/tagwall.php ]
• Top Ten Album playlists for selected genre's, updated weekly
• Genre playlist folders,  sub folders for sub genres
• Drag and drop into aphabetical order.  Band name or artist's surname?  Drag and drop gives much more flexability than any automated sorting feature can do.

Playlists are hands down the easiest way to manage your Spotify library.

Spotify badly needs a way to find new additions to their library.  tag:new, tunigo, swarm.fm, spotimy.uk....  all work great for brand new releases, but additions of older material rarely if ever get shown in the respective links.

[nemof]

cheers, much appreciated. I'd never heard of spotimy.co.uk. I'm personally not very keen on playlists being used to organise albums, I'd rather they have a specific purpose, eg large mixes of individual tracks, but spotify has decided to build it this way. I'm hoping Collections might be a solution to this.

[Rollo_]

I like to keep albums in playlists for easy access and for shuffle play purposes.

[user-removed]

What I do, (or did, since I gave up using Spotify as my primary listening tool because of this issue) - was to create a master playlist folder called "By Artist" - then create a sub-playlist for each artist, where I put all of that artist's songs.  Of course, since there is not a third level, I can't create playlists by album.  In any event, I ultimately decided it was all nonsense - as is the inability to remove a song from my library directly (have to delete it in the primary playlist first, or however you do it) - and I just gave up.  

Spotify - if you want to see the right way to manage a music library - get a subscription to Rdio.

[schaumermal]

Hi nemof,

I'm quite new in the community, therefore I will ask more questions than I can answer you.

I fact, when I organised my music on my PC to fulfil three needs:

- To use playlists where I put music for specific purposes or for specific needs. This works for me also very well with Spotify.

- I sorted all my music by name of group/artists. Here I miss a function (ok, I did not yet find a function), where I can just safe a link to an artist or even just to a CD. On my PC I could easily organise a tree structure, first in alphabetical order for artists, then for the CDs.

- To have stored the favourite CDs in a folder structure. In Spotify I could see so far that you can have only a list of playlists, but no sub-playlists (allowing, again, a tree structure).

The library becomes a too long list of hits, if you enter several albums, and then really difficult to manage. Same with the starred list.

But maybe someone has already detected either how to create sub playlists anbd/or how only mark albums and/or artists, and can tell me how to apply, that would be great help!

Schau Mermal

[Joe]

Hi. You can create playlist folder then drop playlists into them which helps a bit. In the client you do this from the file menu item. Collection, which is in beta testing should make life a lot simpler eventually.

[BulletTimeFX]

With the playlists you have to manually drag them into order. There is no button to click on to sort from A to Z. Maybe this so called collections app might help. But isn't there no auto feature on spotify itself?

[mindecosta]

yes, library organization is not intuitive.

Create 'playlist folder', file by alpha, by first or last name. Folders need to be named in a sensible way, so there's a wild card. I also use: In Rotation, New, for current listening.

One can also do screen grabs for content listings. I listen daily, and create playlists.

One can always start from scratch, even every day, and create something to serve your listening needs. At any rate, it's all there, but that is part of the problem. How does one organize five million tunes!? Yikes!

[mindecosta]

My most effective system so far:

Create folders ie A-C, D-F, G-I.alphabetize within each by artist name

Use first or last name. You'll find it one way or another.

Master Folder by artist name. Add albums. Create 'name mix' with favorite songs.

[mindecosta]

Yea. Pretty much how I do it and it's working, but the larger my library, the more challenging it gets. Still we do have access to all the music in the world. Unbelievable!

[AdamRi95]

In the Playlists section at the top you should be able to see a filter button. Press that option then choose a category such as alphabetical or custom order 🙂 

[mindecosta]

Thank you. I see no filter button in Playlists.