"remove these songs" tool?

[spotartie]

I maintain a shared playlist.  No perfect tool exists for what I need, but some tools help.  I don't mind doing some manual work... copy and paste songs Control-C Control-V etc.

But the one missing piece in my workflow --- is a "remove these songs" tool.

Suppose I had a playlist of "dogs".  I want to know none of the "dogs" are on the resulting playlist.  It'd be great to run the tool and presto: dogs-gone. 😉

Is there anything around like that?

[spotartie]

SCENARIO: I am another lazy DJ.  I combine a few playlists for dancers.  I use one of the tools like "sort your playlist" or choisic to sort by bpm, since they like to start slow, get fast later!

PROBLEM: Even in the good 3rd party lists, there are some "dogs".  How am I going to periodically refresh my combined playlist, but pruned of all the "dogs"?

IDEAL: one of the swiss army knife tools should do this!  

SADLY: they don't  (anyone listening?)

WORKAROUND: YOU CAN make it easier.  Use the app (ANDROID at least I have tested). 

HOW: Go to your "dog-gone" list.  Go through the list one by one, click the "meatballs" menu, select "Add to other playlist"

WAIT... I DON'T WANT THAT: thankfully the app developers were on a long leash, and got ahead of the PC app and the web app here.  

"Add to another playlist" could as easily be called "Delete from another playlist". 

The app finds all the playlists you own, and lists the ones that contain the "dog" song.  The "dog-gone" list and your target list are shown with default "checkmark"s for you to modify. 

SO: Instead of leaving them all checked, you UNCHECK target list.  Presto, the dog is gone from that list.

Works OK if your "dogs" list isn't TOO LONG 😉

[Ximzend]

You can use the third-party app Smarter Playlists to filter track from your dogs out of your main playlist. You can even combine playlist, randomize the tracks, sort by bpm, and filter out duplicates (to some extent).

[spotartie]

Looks very cool.. I'll check it out... 

I see a number of filters.  But the one I am looking for, filter by playlist, seems missing??

[Ximzend · Accepted solution]

Under Filters, you can choose for Track filter. "This component takes two input streams. It produces a stream of tracks from the green input stream with the tracks on the red input stream removed."

After you added two playlist sources (and filled in the details), you can connect one with Green and one with Red to the track filter by first clicking on the playlist source, and then on the filter.

[spotartie]

Thanks Ximzend, this seems to be a real stand-out tool amongst the crowd... I'm surprised I missed it for years!  

[spotartie]

Well sadly I hit problems... and I the Google groups support URL doesn't work.

Problem is, there seems to be some filter applied to playlists before I see them inside the tool. 

One playlist has 300 items on it.  If I plunk it on the designer (alone, no filters) and click to run, I see a bit more than half of them.   The source is on github with some forks, but I'm not quite up to wokring through that now ;-(.

But I'll mark as a Solution, it's a neat idea.  If the cause is something like market issues, it may work for some people.  Definitely worth a look anyway, it's a cool tool ;-).

[Ximzend]

I forgot to say you can save a maximum of 1000 tracks to a playlist on that site.

Editing the sourcecode and running it locally can indeed be an option.

[spotartie]

Well I went back and got it working.  So... no reservations, this is the cat's meow ;-).

My prob: when spotify tools ask me for a URI, I usually try the URL.  If it chokes, then I do the extra typing URL=>URI. 

But with this tool, that works sometimes (i.e first time I tried it) and quietly gives the wrong answer sometimes (i.e. second time I tried it). 

In the absence of an error message, I concluded it was flakey.

But I find if you ALWAYS use correct URI ... yes it's good.. it's worth the typing... 😉 ... love it.

[Ximzend]

When you press and hold the Alt or Control key, you can copy the URI.

Sorry that I didn't say it earlier.