Hive Mind Playlists
November 27, 2016 7:52 AM   Subscribe

Hive Mind Playlists
Magically translate AskMe song recommendations into Spotify playlists (it takes a minute or two).

I've often wished that I could just hit "play" on some of AskMe's song recommendation threads. This project sort of lets you do that.

Theres a mix of guessing and natural language processing going on. Feel free to dive into the code (link below), but the rough process is:

1. Assemble a list of "recommendations" by:
 * checking any links to youtube for video titles (since they are usually metadata-rich); otherwise, looking for link text
 * looking for capitalized words or "interesting" words/phrases in comments
2. Search Spotify for each recommendation string and take the first track of the results.
3. Return the tracklist.

The code is all on github (I'd welcome any contributions!), and please report any bugs or problems on the issues page.

TODOs: I'd like for the site layout to be more responsive, and I'd like a button that lets you export the playlist directly to your spotify account. This would require the user to log in with OAuth credentials.
Role: programmer
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? (5 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite

When I copy the address to open in spotify, could it show as a playlist? Currently it will play the songs but just as the kind of 'up next' track list.
posted by ellieBOA at 4:47 AM on November 28, 2016


Yep, that's definitely on my list of what to add next. However, it's adds a lot more complexity, since you'd have to sign in to your spotify account and give my site the "create playlists" permission.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 7:50 PM on November 28, 2016


Great! Brilliant idea too.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:51 AM on November 29, 2016


Hey, this is excellent! It even has interesting results for threads that have no songs in them.

A couple things you can do to make these playlists more shareable:

- Include the AskMe url in the hash part of the url and have the app route using that. e.g. Going to `http://nadavrecca.com/hivemindplaylists/#/ask.metafilter.com/303152/`would automatically load up the AskMe thread and generate the playlist. That way people could just pass around that url and say, "hey, check out this neat playlist the app made for me".

- If you include all of the Spotify URIs for the tracks in the playlist as text, people could create their own playlists in the app and just paste those URIs in to get the playlist.

Again, great work! I'll have to look at the language processing when I get a chance.
posted by ignignokt at 8:07 AM on November 29, 2016


Great feedback, thanks! I will give the URL hashing a go-round. Never done it before.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 1:14 PM on November 29, 2016


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