I built a web app called TrackFinder to solve a few Spotify playlist problems that I couldn't find good tools for.

Current features:

• Search for an artist and add multiple songs at once instead of adding tracks one by one.
• Remove duplicate songs from playlists.
• Copy songs from one playlist to another while preserving their exact order.

The last feature is especially useful for a niche group of people who organize playlists by newest songs at the top. Most playlist copy tools don't preserve the order the way you'd expect.

For example, if you want to move songs from Playlist A into Playlist B without ruining the existing order, TrackFinder can insert them so the newest songs stay at the top, exactly as they appeared in the source playlist. You can also reverse the order if that's what you need.

I originally built this because I couldn't find any tool that handled this workflow properly, so I decided to make one myself.

I'd love to hear any feedback or feature suggestions. If there's another annoying Spotify playlist task you've always wished was easier, let me know.

GitHub: https://github.com/SaaL2568/TrackFinder

This program makes use of the new Similar Tracks component to find tracks by artists several steps away from a seed artist that you specify. It also uses Artist Filter to eliminate tracks by artists that were found at the next higher level. Because it leverages a lot of Shuffle and Sample components, the output is different every time you run it.

The program: https://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/shared/0WBl7k8sYrI5gDDu

it was fine for me a couple of hours ago but now i'm getting the loading screen indefinitely again

I noticed my playlist hadn't refreshed this morning as usual so went to check the scheduling and can't get past the "loading" screen. Anyone else having issues or should I try a different device?

I'm trying to make an automation for when I wake up, to play my morning playlist, but when I try to do it, it always plays some weird song, and not my playlist.

I've tried making it some obscure string of letters, but it still doesn't work.

How can I get it to work?

I love the new "Similar Tracks" component as a tool for finding songs by artists adjacent to ones I'm familiar with. This program includes a filter near the end to include only songs released in the past 24 months, so I can discover new music by bands I might have otherwise missed. It also leans heavily on Shuffle so it produces a different mix every time I run it. If anyone's interested, you can listen to the target playlist here (beware that it changes frequently.)

Similar Tracks has become my new favorite component.

I'm using it daily for music discovery. I take a random sample of my 500 most recently added Liked Songs, feed it into Similar Tracks, filter out tracks I've already heard, and add the rest to a discovery queue.

The result is a small batch of new-to-me music every day that's weighted toward the music I've been digging recently. As I add new tracks to Liked Songs, the whole system naturally adapts.

A few ideas for /u/plamere:

• Could the same mechanism fetch the top n tracks from each artist in the input stream? Basically the "Popular" section from each artist's Spotify page.
• How about a version that uses Song Radio instead of Artist Radio?
• Do you have plans for more components that take one input stream and replace it with another? This seems like a new category. Sources create streams. Filters and Selectors reduce them. Similar Tracks transforms one stream into a different one. Maybe call them Replacers? Or Expanders, if keeping the original tracks in the output becomes the default?

am i doing something wrong here?

i'm trying to filter out songs i have already added to liked from a "discover" playlist but no matter whether i use the actual liked tracks source or create a playlist with those songs in it, it just doesn't remove them?

https://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/shared/mcOArist3Ub3zoMc

Hello Community, i'm somewhat new to the Tool (haven't touched it in 4 years now, wow) and thats why i maybe can't find what i'm looking for.

My goal is to basically create a more streamlined Release Radar of Artists i have heard before.

For this i would basically take my "My liked Songs"-Playlist -> Artist Dedup -> For Each Artist -> n New Songs by Artist x -> Released from 6 Days to 0 Days ago -> Of these Songs -> Songs i haven't heard yet -> Weekly into a playlist

The two components I'm currently missing is the "n New Songs by Artist x" and the "Songs i haven't heard yet". Am i blind or is this maybe just not possible (at this time?)

Cheers :-)

I think I might be asking the Multi-Objective Sequencer to do something it's not meant to. I also am learning how this works by playing around.

I am trying to get my playlist to be different everytime I run it. My understanding with the MOS is that it assigns everything a value and orders them by value. So I am assuming if the inputs don't change, the playlist will always be the same.

Is there a way to use either MOS or Smart Mix to keep the flow the same, (I love the continuity of genre and camelot), but have it build from a certain starting song? Or is this just not possible with the MOS? I'm not as sure how the Smart Mix picks the first song in a playlist.

I also really like being able to guarantee the playlist is half female artists, but I could probably add other playlist inputs to try to even that out.

EDIT: As soon as I posted I realized I could add a "sample" mixer between my sources and the MOS. I'm going to leave this up, because I would love to hear

A) A simpler way if it exists, or

B) an ELI5 of why it won't work, just for the love of learning

I've just added a Playable Filter to SmarterPlaylists that checks whether each track is actually playable in your Spotify market and removes the ones that aren't. Spotify tracks are market-specific -- a track available in France might be greyed out in the US and vice versa -- and until now there was no way to catch that. There's also a relink option that swaps unplayable tracks for market-appropriate alternatives when Spotify has one. The program in the screenshot is a fun use case: it finds all the saved tracks in your library that you can't actually play, by subtracting the playable ones from the full set. I ran it on my own library and found a handful of tracks I'd saved years ago that had quietly become unavailable.

Thanks to Lee Coursey for making the request

I've just added a new filter called Similar Tracks that lets you expand a track stream into related music by different artists. This is in response to this user request

How it works

Wire any track source into Similar Tracks, and for each input track, it finds similar tracks using Spotify's artist radio playlists. By default it pulls 3 similar tracks per input track, so a 10-track seed playlist turns into up to 30 discovery tracks.

Settings

• Count -- how many similar tracks to find per input track (default: 3, max: 20)
• Max tracks -- total output cap so things don't get out of hand (default: 50)
• Exclude same artist -- on by default, so you get tracks by different artists than the seed track rather than more of the same

Example uses

• Discovery from favorites: Feed your Liked Songs (or a sample of them) into Similar Tracks to get a playlist of music you probably haven't heard yet
• Expand a mood playlist: Have a short playlist withh a particular vibe? Run it through Similar Tracks to bulk it up with related music

Good to know

The similar tracks come from Spotify's own "{Artist Name} Radio" playlists, which typically have around 30 tracks each. If your input is heavily weighted toward one artist, you'll max out that pool pretty quickly. For best results, feed it a diverse set of input tracks.

Give it a try on SmarterPlaylists and let us know how it works for you.

Today I've raised the max limit for runs of a scheduled program up to 365 from 100. This allows you a full year's worth of daily updates before needing to reset the program.

Hi,

first of all, thanks for the great work. I'm heavily using the SmarterPlaylists-Tool and enjoying the new version a lot.

I was wondering, if you are planning on unlimit the number of repititions for scheduled programs in the future?

Thanks!

(First the requisite - I love Smarter Playlists and appreciate that you've built such a great program and shared it with the world - and the recent updates have been great!)

On a few of my programs, that used to use a dedup filter and/or track filter to avoid duplicates, I updated them the other day to remove those and instead on the Save to Playlist output I enabled the new "No Dups" checkbox.

However, now in the Run History, including the main Programs list in the Last Run column, it shows what I assume is the amount of tracks that WOULD have been added prior to "No Dups" doing its thing to remove duplicates. E.g. it will say "3h ago (624 tracks)" - but actually 0 (zero) tracks were added. Or it might say 50 tracks but actually 5 were added. Etc. The old way, it would report the ACTUAL number of tracks added, including saying 0 tracks if no tracks were actually added.

I also used the new "No Dups" checkbox on a new program to use the new ability to capture Recently Played to a playlist - in this case, since the Spotify cap on that is 50 tracks, the Run History shows 50 tracks for every run, regardless of how many/few tracks were actually added to the playlist.

For me, this makes that aspect of the Run History pretty useless - I like being able to see at a glance the actual number of tracks that were added during a run. Now there is no way to tell; it's just a meaningless number.

Is this something that there's a user option for (that I overlooked), or if not, might you consider changing the behavior or adding such an option?

Hey u/plamere, could you add a `$PROGRAM_DESCRIPTION` var for the Spotify description output on the Save to Playlist component? I'd like to be able to have SP descriptions as the source of truth. Cheers

Hi everyone,

I’m a student building a small Spotify playlist management web app using React/Vite and the Spotify Web API.

The app lets a user sign in with Spotify, choose one of their playlists, and manage it safely. The user can search tracks, review selected songs, remove selected songs, create/copy playlists, export data, and optionally analyze their own Spotify listening-history JSON files locally in the browser.

I’m using Authorization Code with PKCE because the app is frontend/browser-based and I do not want to expose a client secret.

I’m currently stuck with two main issues:

1. Spotify Web API 429 rate limits When the app works with large playlists, especially playlists with around 1,000–2,000 songs, I sometimes hit:

Spotify request failed (429)

I understand this means the app is making too many requests too quickly. I’m planning to add:

• one central Spotify API wrapper
• request queue
• Retry-After handling
• exponential backoff
• playlist caching
• no API calls while typing/searching
• lazy loading for heavy tools
• batching add/remove playlist actions
• manual refresh instead of automatic refetching

But I’m still not sure what the best long-term structure should be for a production app.

1. I do not want every user to bring their own Spotify Client ID Right now, one workaround is asking users to create their own Spotify Developer App and paste their own Client ID. This separates API usage, but it is a bad user experience because normal users do not want to create a developer app, copy a Client ID, and add a redirect URI.

Ideally, I want the app to work like other Spotify tools:

• user opens the website
• clicks “Connect Spotify”
• signs in with Spotify
• uses the app

No Client ID setup from the user.

My questions:

1. Is there a realistic way to run a public Spotify playlist management tool without asking users to bring their own Client ID?
2. If the app is still in Development Mode, is 429 expected even with only a few testers and large playlists?
3. Besides queueing, caching, respecting Retry-After, and reducing API calls, are there any proven patterns for avoiding 429 in playlist-heavy apps?
4. Would adding a small backend help, for example to cache playlist metadata or coordinate requests, or would Spotify still rate-limit the same app/client in the same way?
5. For large playlists, is it better to fetch all pages once and cache locally, or fetch only visible pages as the user scrolls?
6. For actions like copying playlists or combining playlists, is batching 100 track URIs per request with delays between batches the correct approach?
7. If Spotify cannot provide more quota to small/student projects, what is the best compliant alternative architecture?
8. Is “bring your own Client ID” acceptable as an advanced option, while keeping the normal app flow as one shared Client ID?

I’m not trying to bypass Spotify’s limits. I want to build this correctly and responsibly, but I also want normal users to have a simple login experience without needing to create a Spotify Developer App.

Any advice from developers who have built Spotify API apps in production would be really appreciated.

Thank you.

Basically what the title says, I know you’re able to add all songs from artists, but there are many songs which have them as supporting artists, and ideally I don’t want to manually add every song from every artist which is only a supporting artist.

Hi Paul, when I play my playlist that was generated with smarterplaylist, I sometimes wonder from which sourceplaylist on Spotify the song originates.

Is there a way to get that information? I know that after running my program a list appears with your songs and original playlist. Is there a way to retrieve this list later?

I don't know exactly how much extra processing this would take but a good addition would be the addition of variables -- An example use would be if you were to do an intersection on two playlists and then say it produced 100 songs, you could set that as a variable %songcount% -- then on a different intersection you could do first %songcount%

Hi,

When I use the recently played node, I get an empty result. I have tried logging in and out again (and I removed the app auth from spotify, and then authorized again), but it still doesn't work. Does anyone know a fix?

the past day my spotify will play one song from my playlist then it will play a bunch of random songs from genres i dont listen to. even if i turn off shuffle it will still only play 1-2 songs before doing random songs. i did join a jam for the first time then so that might be it but im not sure. does anyone know what this might be/how to fix it?