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> Just as an example, if I wanted to get a list of every song I liked on Spotify and import it into Apple Music, how would that even work? The songId of Spotify

by izacus 5y ago

> Just as an example, if I wanted to get a list of every song I liked on Spotify and import it into Apple Music, how would that even work? The songId of Spotify is undoubtedly different than the one Apple uses. Are Apple and Spotify supposed to agree on a common file format? Why wouldn't it work? Desktop apps had m3u playlist formats which could be read by multiple players - from Winamp on desktop, iTunes on a Mac or even car headunits. It's now kinda wierd to say that rockstar engineers of Apple/Spotify can't find a way to export playlists and liked songs (a global singletons essentially) they got from the SAME publishers and probably ingest from the SAME content owner data sources.

sethhochberg 5y ago
m3u (or really anything that relies on file names to reference media assets) would be a potential disaster... all kinds of weird stuff makes it into your parser when you're dealing with a large enough catalog. I used to work in streaming media, including with some m3u-based legacy systems, and dealt with a pile of edge cases a mile high. But thankfully, the industry solved this problem themselves: ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is already used all over the royalty reporting side of the industry because it specifically solves the problem of referencing an individual recording of a work. DDEX is a content delivery manifest format the industry also uses for this kind of purpose (sharing complex metadata about recordings in a standardized way), but its an 800lb gorilla of a format and not super consumer-friendly. These are things that are all over the back offices of your favorite streaming service, but mostly transparent to the consumer.
- capableweb 5y ago
  This is a great comment, thanks for adding to the conversation. This further gives proof that it is technically feasible for Spotify and Apple Music to be able to import/export playlists across both their services. Looking forward to seeing it happen in reality.
redwall_hp 5y ago
I was thinking the other day about that, sort of. Apple in the early 2000s was really into things like CalDAV and WebDAV. Safari had integrated RSS reading at one point. They embraced standardization and interoperability for many things, at least where important user data was concerned. Then something happened after the iPhone took off and iCloud became a thing, and they became all about vendor lock-in. I assume it comes from being a market leader instead of only having a relatively unpopular computing platform.
- afiori 5y ago
  there also are non-nefarious reason for dropping open standards ( obviously lock-in and profit where a big plus for them ), one would be that on your own technology you can implement, drop, and/or modify whatever functionality you want

by izacus 5y ago

sethhochberg 5y ago

m3u (or really anything that relies on file names to reference media assets) would be a potential disaster... all kinds of weird stuff makes it into your parser when you're dealing with a large enough catalog. I used to work in streaming media, including with some m3u-based legacy systems, and dealt with a pile of edge cases a mile high. But thankfully, the industry solved this problem themselves: ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is already used all over the royalty reporting side of the industry because it specifically solves the problem of referencing an individual recording of a work. DDEX is a content delivery manifest format the industry also uses for this kind of purpose (sharing complex metadata about recordings in a standardized way), but its an 800lb gorilla of a format and not super consumer-friendly. These are things that are all over the back offices of your favorite streaming service, but mostly transparent to the consumer.

capableweb 5y ago
This is a great comment, thanks for adding to the conversation. This further gives proof that it is technically feasible for Spotify and Apple Music to be able to import/export playlists across both their services. Looking forward to seeing it happen in reality.

redwall_hp 5y ago

I was thinking the other day about that, sort of. Apple in the early 2000s was really into things like CalDAV and WebDAV. Safari had integrated RSS reading at one point. They embraced standardization and interoperability for many things, at least where important user data was concerned. Then something happened after the iPhone took off and iCloud became a thing, and they became all about vendor lock-in. I assume it comes from being a market leader instead of only having a relatively unpopular computing platform.

afiori 5y ago
there also are non-nefarious reason for dropping open standards ( obviously lock-in and profit where a big plus for them ), one would be that on your own technology you can implement, drop, and/or modify whatever functionality you want