Creating a shared Spotify Playlist that I can blog about has taken me much longer than I ever expected or hoped it would. I’ve had to learn a fair bit about sharing music, which I didn’t know anything about, and even more about what you can do with Spotify and how it can be made to work with iTunes. A certain sense of satisfaction at having got it to work, but I’d be the first to say that “there must be a better way” and if anyone can suggest it, I’d be grateful.
You start off with the service that does just what you want it to – create a Playlist and then Share it with whosoever you want to share it with, be it Public, or Limited. That’s fine … there’s a bit of a setback when you realise there’s not an easy way of importing the actual Playlist into a blog, so you have to go back to iTunes (where you created it, before importing the track list into Spotify) and saving that Playlist as a text file. This you then have to edit substantially to get any text for the Blogpost.
Then, the major setback, you find that not all the tracks on the playlist are recognised by Spotify; they are played because Spotify plays them as Local Files, but to get the best experience you then have to go through the ones that don’t have a Spotify existence and find the track manually on Spotify itself. This may be because it’s just got a slightly different name to the track on your Playlist. Bother! That will still leave some that don’t appear on Spotify at all – my opera tracks are a good example. As I said before, they play because they play as Local Files, but that won’t do if you want to create a Blogpost that references ALL the tracks on the Playlist.
So you have to create a Shared Folder that you point your readership to and ask them to download the tracks into their own Local Files folder in Spotify – which they will have have had to install on their local machine; would they bother, I think not.
Having done all of that – which is a lot of work to just read a Blogpost – it does work; but it’s not worth the effort for the Writer or the potential Reader, I’m afraid. The best solution is to “forget” about the missing files, just put it down to “c’est la vie”, share the Playlist on tumblr and enjoy the music. Perhaps reading the Blogpost alongside the tumblr stream playing in the background 🙂
