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Show HN: I built a site that lets users find playlists by songs they contain
- mellowhype 4y agoit doesn't work for me. that, or I feed it obscure songs.
- teddyh 4y agoSpotify playlists.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoIt seems that within 10ish minutes the site has already been hugged to near-death. Thank You :D
- urbandw311er 4y agoNice start - I think there is ultimately some value in this approach, but currently seems quite limited in its functionality, for example I can only choose one song? This results in a very large set of results to wade through, many of which will not be helpful or relevant. Personally I'd get far more value if I could chuck in 3-4 favourite songs and see which playlists contains all of them (or order by greatest number of matches first); this would allow me to more accurately match my tastes to discover a potentially new bunch of other songs I might like. If there is a way to match against more songs, apologies! The post title implies there is, but the site seems to suggest it's limited to one song.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThank you for the feedback! It is currently limited to one song, but there is already an issue on github planning multiple song selection. Just haven't gotten around to it yet. As for over-abundance of results, sorting by name length in ascending order should help at least somewhat, but the search approach is an open problem. As an aside: on large screens there is also an option to choose a specific song by dragging it from the Spotify client.
- myself248 4y agoDitto, this is what I thought it was -- the title says "by songS they contain", not "by a song they contain". I really want to see if anyone else has Left Hand Free and Pop Muzik on a playlist together, and if they've found any _other_ songs that contain eeny-meeny-miney-moe in the lyrics and made a playlist of them like I have... (Here's another oddball one, if you're a puzzle type. Bring The Magic - Steve Wynn. So It Goes - Nick Lowe. Roadrunner Once - Jonathan Richman. Heavy Metal - Sammy Hagar.)
- 1-more 4y agoI have extremely niche playlists like this: male and female presenting singers shouting the same lyrics at the same time, songs with cheerleaders in the background, songs by two or more NYC area rappers about high seas piracy. For your list consider adding "Hot" by Liili in which the lyrics code switch Russian and English but do contain "eeny-meeny-money."
- purplecats 4y agobrilliant idea. i already found a couple awesome playlists by repurposing google to be this tool https://www.google.com/search?q=%22state+of+grace%22+%22I%27ll+call+you+mine%22+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Fplaylist%2F https://www.google.com/search?q=%22state+of+grace%22+%22I%27...
- joelennon 4y agoNice idea. I'd recommend adding some kind of visual indicator when it's in a loading state - at first I thought it wasn't working but it was just slow to respond (probably because it's close to the top of HN right now...)
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback! The loading indicator is also on the list, TBH was supposed to go up before ShowHN, but I forgot. And yeah, now the query execution wait time for my measly 2-core postgres instance is about 30 seconds :D.
- fbn79 4y agoFor that I regularly use this free service https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-search-tool-by-song-or-artist/ https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-search-tool-by-song-...
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThis is alternate approach, that uses an advanced Google search under the hood. It works very approximately, given that it searches the song title in everything Google decides to index.
- fbn79 4y agoThank you, was not aware of how it works
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoI'm not a 100% on how it works myself, just a stong hunch based on the site speed and results.
- bugmen0t 4y agoNice idea. Out of curiosity, which song inspired you to build this site?
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoTo be honest I can't remember anymore, it was a few years back that I initially got the idea for it. Might have been Alone by The Upbeats.
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoI need something that can find the song from my out of tune, only partially remembered humming
- NomadicDaggy 4y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/ might be able to help with that
- dewey 4y agoSoundHound used to do that, looks like it can still be used through: https://www.midomi.com https://www.midomi.com
- mtwshngtn 4y agoMelodic contours might help you[0]--you only need to remember if the tune goes up or down. [0]: https://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html https://www.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.html
- hammock 4y agoHow does this work on mobile? There’s no submit form button
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback, I'll add a button. For me it works just by pressing "enter" on the mobile keyboard, but admittedly I didn't test it very thoroughly.
- hammock 4y agoMaybe I tested it during hug of death. Return “worked” (I could press it) but there was no indication given even by the browser progress bar that anything was happening as a result
- mcv 4y agoNice timing. I need a good danceable rock playlist by the end of the week. I could create my own, or I could use some danceable rock songs to find an existing playlist.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoGreat to hear! Just not that the site is very unresponsive right now, thanks to all the HN love. So probably a good idea to bookmark it and come back later.
- icosian 4y agoI have wished for something like this, so I tried it out, using _Beauty Beats_, by Beats Antique. I got one of your own playlists - what are the odds?! Works great, thank you!
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoAwesome, thanks!
- hahamrfunnyguy 4y agoCool concept. The site seems to be succumbing to the HN effect. There should be some kind of loading indicator on the first search, it didn't seem to be doing anything but when I went to close out the page there were results. I typed "One Beer" into search and a lot of duplicate entries came up.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback! The loading indicator is an overlook on my side and you are not the only one that noticed :D. I seem to have been very naive about how HN might affect the site.
- e-clinton 4y agoApple Music already has this feature. Does Spotify not?
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoOther people have made similar tools, but Spotify still hasn't added any native playlist-search-by-tracks AFAIK.
- wintermutestwin 4y agoCould you point me to some detail on how to actually do this in AM?
- e-clinton 4y agoIf you search on Apple Music (and actually tap “search”, don’t use the autocomplete results), there will be a list of categories on top. Playlist is one of those categories. You need to type out song name and artist when you search, otherwise it will just search for playlists by that name. Obviously this could be a lot better.
- ThreePinkApples 4y agoLol, the first song I searched for game 0 results. (Searched for "More With You"). Oh and a bug: If I first search for something and get a result, then enter a new search and scroll down before this new search has completed, it starts searching for page 2-7 of this new search term. Even better if you've already triggered the search for page 2-7 on that first term. If you then scroll down after updating the search, it is now searching for page 8-11 of that new search term :)
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks, I registered the issue on GitHub.
- brumm 4y agoAmazing! Something I've been meaning to build myself and now I don't have to. I'd like to echo the need for multiple song search—my use case for this was good playlists in cafes where I want to identify the playlist based on 1-3 shazam'd songs.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks and noted! :)
- davidktr 4y agoWhat do I have to do after entering a song? Pressing Enter does nothing (Firefox, Safari, MacOS).
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoAs other people have noted, the site is missing a loading indicator and currently, very many people are trying to access it, so you are doing everything correctly, just currently requests take upwards of 30 seconds to process.
- davidktr 4y agothanks
- krzyk 4y agoThanks, I was wondering what I'm doing incorrectly (Firefox, Linux).
- fluxinflex 4y agoI once built a site that used Spotify playlist data directly. The intention was that you could take one of your own playlist and find playlists that have the greatest overlaps. The intention was to find people with a similiar musical taste to yourself. Interestingly I found a lot of new music that way and also found other music directions that suddenly interested me. Thinking this a little further, it provides the perfekt basis for a dating application. Music is a very personally representation of oneself and if you find someone who has the same muscial taste, you already have a common basis for communication. Obviously this never made it past developer status since Spotify does not like third party apps storing their data (i.e. playlists of other people). You can use the data but not store it or analyse it. It made me think that Spotify should build a dating app since they would have no interest in keeping you in their dating app as thats not their main business, unlike other dating platforms that have little interest in losing their customers.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoInteresting idea! Slightly off-topic, but originally I had planned to organically grow the playlist count by allowing users to login with their Spotify account and reading their playlists. I even made a prototype...but turns out Spotify only allows working with user data once you have your API quota extended, which seemed like quite the undertaking.
- fluxinflex 4y agoYer their quote system is a bit painful. I built a bunch of background jobs that continually retrieved data ... max'ed out the quote limit constantly. I even went as far as setting a second developer account to have a larger limit ;) I also did a writeup[1] on lessons learnt in case someone is interested in rinsing and repeating on this idea. [1]=https://gregorius.rippenstein.art/works/hamoni https://gregorius.rippenstein.art/works/hamoni
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoI'll check out the write-up, thanks. As for user-data, the request count limit is not even the limiting factor. If you want to request data with a users token, you can't at all, without getting a quota extension (apart from 25 pre-registered developer users).
- santiagobasulto 4y agoThis is very helpful! I've searched for this in the past. There's sometimes one song I like and I'd like to find more like that. Something useful I found is the "Go to song radio" in Spotify, that creates kind of a "dynamic" playlist with similar songs.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThank you very much! I also use the Spotify radios a lot, but they are heavily curated - they contain a lot of songs that you already have in a playlist or have liked. So they are useful for listening, but slightly less for strictly music discovery.
- its_bbq 4y agoI use radios in a hybrid approach. I'll make a radio, find a song I like, and then go play the album through and let Spotify start recommending, and repeat. Tends to make enough variety to get me to all sorts of interesting places
- jonas-w 4y agoI think searching by the spotify song id / song link, would be easier in my opinion, as I couldn't really find what i was looking for.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThat functionality already exists, but is prompted for only on large screens, because I didn't think anybody would use it on mobile. And thanks for the feedback!
- jonas-w 4y agoThanks, checked it out on my laptop. Great stuff!
- sva_ 4y agoI tried it with a few tracks from a very popular playlist ('Yoga Electronica'). First track couldn't be found. Second track could be found, but it couldn't find the aforementioned playlist (with almost 200k likes). Third song also can't seem to be found. So I'm thinking that the indexing is not complete. Unless I misunderstand something.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback! Currently the database contains only ~18k playlists and ~1.4M tracks. So only the relationships between them are used in the app. Edit: theres even a counter at the top of the page, but it takes a while to show up, because of the HN effect.
- stall84 4y agoSpotify has had a pretty awesome public api for a while
- nsteel 4y agoIt looks great on paper but the quotas and lack of support make it painful to use outside of toys. The dev forums are full of these complaints, and before that the github repos were too. We are long overdue being moved to another platform so they can more legitimately ignore the same old support issues and requests they don't intend to solve. Websockets is a good example, libspotify successor another. Frustrating.
- canadiantim 4y agoThanks god, been waiting for this concept to be implemented in a better way
- starkd 4y agoGood start, but I'm not sure how song title can extract meaningful similar songs. I put in "Big Time" (song by Peter Gabriel) and it came back with a list of songs from a variety of genres. From smooth jazz selections to songs by Bjork. I think you really need a machine learning approach that categorizes songs by their signal content into categories.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback! You are supposed to click on a song to see playlists it contains. Sorry for the unclear UI.
- starkd 4y agoahh I see. Yeah that makes more sense.
- megablast 4y agoGot excited. Saw it was Spotify. No longer excited.
- opheliate 4y agoThis kind of thing has always seemed quite interesting (and worrying!) to me from an OSINT perspective. It seems like if you just know a couple of some anonymous person's favourite songs from various genres, you could identify possible Spotify accounts they may also own. As far as I can tell, it's basically impossible to discuss anything remotely personal online without jeopardizing pseudonymity.
- bqmjjx0kac 4y agoIt's kind of horrifying to learn that it only takes 33 bits of information to uniquely identify any living human on the planet. log2(8e9) ~= 32.9.
- OJFord 4y agoIf it helps (with the horror I mean), that's just a sort of lower bound of course - if you could choose your bits carefully and ideally (and I suppose they'd probably be pretty weird (to a human) and overlapping/multi-dimensional, like 'lives in Europe or Antarctica' or 'uses macOS and is female') which of course you couldn't. i.e. in practice, for practical metrics, it probably takes a lot (I'm not going to guess how many) more.
- status200 4y agoWhat data would be useful from finding someone's Spotify? I dont use it so I'm not sure what details can be compromised.
- myself248 4y agoBecause there's a good chance they use the same username on other services. If you didn't already know that, now you might.
- opheliate 4y agoYep, plus I know a lot of my friends using Spotify login using Facebook, which displays their full name & profile photo. Also followers/following lists are public, so if you can find a close contact of theirs who is less serious about opsec, you're that much closer to their actual identity. This is only really relevant to the truly paranoid who try to use a different identity for every service.
- theschwa 4y agoThank you so much for this! I've always wanted this capability, and I plan on making extensive use of it.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoAwesome, glad you like it!
- ArcaneMoose 4y agoSpotify API is pretty cool. I created https://hotkeyplayer.com/ https://hotkeyplayer.com/ with it to quickly map keys to playlists and launch them with the press of a button. Used for switching music during D&D sessions
- lagrange77 4y agoCool! I Would love something like this for Youtube.
- aantix 4y agoI’ve maintained a playlist for years of my favorite sad songs. Mostly acoustic and piano based, lesser-known songs. Please add it to your index. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhMrEC5L8T4FmbQP78B5gzEJhwJ1LNH_Z https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhMrEC5L8T4FmbQP78B5gzEJh...
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoCurrently the site only works with Spotify tracks and playlists. If you care to create a public spotify playlist, I'll gladly add it in.
- oliv__ 4y agoIt's kind of mind boggling to me that Spotify doesn't offer this themselves. Seems like use case 101
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThere's a post in their official forums with 60+ pages from 2012, but they state that there's not enough demand...
- myself248 4y agoLike literally everything in their forums. There's a reason I dropped them.
- chimen 4y agoYou have spotify radio which is very similar.
- dailyplanet 4y agoSpotify already has a "Discovered On" section on the Artist page which has playlists that include the artists.
- dawnerd 4y agoWhen on dark mode the results are really card to read fyi. Love this concept, way quicker than using the “found on” in the Spotify app - which doesn’t even always work that well.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback, I'll look into it.
- parski 4y agoI tried a song called "Chase Init_" by dragging and dropping but it doesn't work. A Wingdings-song isn't a problem though for some reason.
- nsbk 4y agoThis is very convenient, but it didn't work well for me on the first attempt. The song I used is called "Love", from Colour Haze. > Found 32646 tracks. Yikes. Adding the artist to the search yields 0 results, and since it only loads a number of results until you scroll to the bottom of the page, I could not find the track I wanted. It would be great to have the option to specify the author somehow
- shtopointo 4y agoThis feedback is coming from someone that wants to discover new / unknown bands in specific genres. I have a playlist of new / unknown bands I've discovered over the years, but searching with your tool didn't give back anything. The playlist in case you want to use it for testing later: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5DcbwcCkBde68RgsxO2Sn2 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5DcbwcCkBde68RgsxO2Sn2 Ideas for improvement: * autocomplete * autocomplete with song, artist and album image * allow for search by track & artist name * match up one of my playlists with a playlist you have in your DB
- boraoztunc 4y agoYou can generate new songs with Echoes app. Connect your Spotify account, you will explore top artists, top songs and recently played. Also New Discovery section will generate playlists in a specific genre, if you click Load New Tracks, it will generate new songs through your Spotify algorithm. https://echoesapp.io https://echoesapp.io
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for the feedback, I'll look into it!
- xiavan405 4y agoSpotify sorely needs this feature. Great work!
- pks016 4y agoFound some playlists for a few songs. But doesn't work for others. Says Spotify track link should look like 'https://open.spotify.com/track/22numbersOrLetters https://open.spotify.com/track/22numbersOrLetters'
- hsur8192 4y agoThis is neat! I built a similar service that basically uses song playlist co-occurrence to generate song recommendations for any given Spotify track, and have found some good initial success for more popular tracks / artists [1]. The bottleneck here is using the Spotify API to find relevant playlists - as others have noted here, Spotify's API doesn't provide a way to perform direct lookup of playlists containing a given track, so the best approach I've found is to perform many text-based searches for desired search terms (e.g. artist, song name), and then do breadth-first-search on playlists created by the same users from the initial result set, in order to find other playlists that might have the artist or song you are looking for. [1] Available in very limited fashion at https://vybe.link https://vybe.link; this is a Spotify beta application so the full app only works for whitelisted Spotify accounts
- nickstinemates 4y agoThis is really nice. I especially like the feature that let's your drag a song from a UI into the app. Very handy. Vibin to a new playlist now.
- illwrks 4y agoThis is great, I popped in a song title from a band I like and found a playlist with some tracks that sound really good!
- waingake 4y agoI made a site to record and vote on playlists sorted by last updated as well as popularity https://playlists.mohiohio.com https://playlists.mohiohio.com
- fny 4y agoCan someone please build an inverse recommendation system? These recommender systems are too good at giving me things similar to what I've already heard.
- LanceH 4y agoI always thought something like this for movies that contain a favorite song might reveal a hidden gem or two.
- lemax 4y agoI use 1001 tracklists for this - you can search by track and it will surface DJ sets where the song was played. https://www.1001tracklists.com/ https://www.1001tracklists.com/
- brent_noorda 4y agoLove it. This is one of the primary features that RDIO had that I miss in Spotify, because it allows for discovering songs, as in “if someone likes this song enough to add it to a song list, I wonder what else they like”. I look forward to the indexing to increase, because many of my favorites aren’t in your index yet. (And they what would it be like if you cooold enter two or more song titles?)
- mackorone 4y agoCool project! I maintain an archive of Spotify playlists, scraped daily via GitHub Actions: https://github.com/mackorone/spotify-playlist-archive https://github.com/mackorone/spotify-playlist-archive. If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear about your experience with the Spotify API. What endpoints do you use? How often do you call them? How do you handle rate limiting? Has Spotify reached out regarding storing playlist data (being in violation of their terms of service)? Any other lessons or advice? Additionally, I wonder if there's any opportunity for collaboration here. Perhaps you can use the archive to fill out your dataset? Maybe it can act as a cache for your system's scraping needs? Perhaps our Web UIs could link to each other or be combined somehow (https://spotifyplaylistarchive.com/ https://spotifyplaylistarchive.com/)? > Currently we keep track of 18378 Spotify playlists How did you find all of these playlists? Querying Spotify for "Spotify"-owned playlists gives me less than 5000 results. I'd love to add more playlists to my archive but I don't have good discovery mechanisms, especially for non-Spotify-owned playlists.
- odysseus 4y agoThanks for this! I tried 3 songs and they came back not found. But on the 4th, I got a good hit! (Mix of Progressive, Deep House & Trance, designed for High Intensity Focus & Created for my Medical School Studying by Austin Nguyen) https://playlists.dags.dev/tracks/7xdkou0YaNLW9hWXU9MRcR/playlists https://playlists.dags.dev/tracks/7xdkou0YaNLW9hWXU9MRcR/pla... Tried a bunch more without success. Granted, I like a lot of obscure electronica.
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for trying it out! There currently are only 18k playlists indexed, so only those can be found. I've been planing a feature, where users can suggest playlist search terms by which I should extend the index.
- oedstero 4y agoI'd love to see a playlist of submitted songs that aren't part of your playlist scrape.
- oedstero 4y agoI'd love to see a playlist of songs you don't have in any playlist.
- darrinlallen 4y ago
- braingenious 4y ago“Boobs” by Ruth Wallis doesn’t appear to be indexed by this site?
- soheilpro 4y agoYou can also use https://volt.fm https://volt.fm for this. And it currently has 337,502 playlists indexed. Disclaimer: I've built this.
- markussss 4y agoI tried to search for a song I found to be quite cool, Rotoscoping by PTRD. I got two matches, one "Discover Weekly Archive" made by Skiley.net on behalf of NomadicDaggy (you, the creator of this post and service). The second one was a "On Repeat"-playlist! Here, I realized that it's possible to look at other people's "On Repeat"-playlists, even though they are styled by the Spotify app to look like it's your own. It's kind of weird that I only found this song in your playlists, and not in one of my playlists which also contains this song. For example: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0IntLgAqI2EysEvqwiivXQ?si=3d73c0a767924937 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0IntLgAqI2EysEvqwiivXQ?si=... Anyway, I'm checking out your "On Repeat" playlist, however it might be better if your personally generated playlists are excluded? I'm not sure. Really cool service!
- NomadicDaggy 4y agoThanks for trying it out! The site only includes indexed playlists and tracks, which have to be updated semi-manually, so currently only 18k playlists can be found. I plan to increase this, of course, but not at a crazy rate, because I'm hosting this out of my own pocket.
- SeqDesign 4y agothank you