Playlistify Blog

Heb jij je Lowlands pLLaylist al gemaakt? #LL10 [dutch]

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:07:00 -0400

A dutch post for our dutch followers:

We lanceerden onlangs de webtool ‘pLLaylist’ welke te vinden is op het speciale Lowlandsblog van nrc.next, waarmee jij als Lowlandsbezoeker je persoonlijke blokkenschema, die je op Lowlands.nl kan maken, in een handomdraai kunnen ‘bakken’ tot een afspeelbare playlist.

Interactief blokkenschema op Lowlands.nl
Op Lowlands.nl kunnen festivalbezoekers voorafgaand aan het festival het blokkenschema bestuderen. Gebruikers kunnen optredens markeren als favoriet en deze exporteren als kalender-bestand voor diverse softare. Zo kunnen bezoekers de lijst op hun telefoon importeren. Ook komen de artiesten terug op het zogenaamde ‘Llowlife’ profiel van bezoekers, het online community netwerk van Lowlands.

Ruim 80% van de Lowlands muziekprogrammering aanwezig op Spotify
De programmering van Lowlands bestaat naast theater, kunst, mode, films, comedy, literatuur uit veel muziek. Op de in afgelopen mei in Nederland geïntroduceerde van oorsprong Zweedse muziekdienst Spotifyzijn van de 172 Lowlands muziek acts zo’n 142 artiesten en bands met tracks terug te vinden. De playlist webservice Playlistify uit Amsterdam maakt gebruik van deze Spotify catalogus voor de ‘pLLaylist’-tool.

De persoonlijke ‘pLLaylist’ is een lijst met muziek van favoriete artiesten
Via de tool welke te vinden is op http://nrcnext.playlistify.org kunnen Lowlands bezoekers hun gebruikersnaam van Lowlands.nl (hun ‘Llowlife’) invoeren. De tool haalt vervolgens de lijst met favoriete artiesten van de gebruiker op en zoekt op Spotify van alle artiesten een aantal willekeurige tracks. Tezamen vormen deze de ‘pLLaylist’.

De ‘pLLaylist’ is direct afspeelbaar via Spotify en Last.fm
Via de tool kan de playlist direct worden geopend in Spotify. Spotify voorziet in cd-kwaliteit audiostream welke gebruikers, afhankelijk van het type abonnement, ook offline via hun computer, Android toestel of iPhone kunnen afspelen. Via Playlistify zelf kunnen gebruikers de playlist ook toevoegen aan de Britse muziekdienst Last.fm die abonnees ook de mogelijkheid biedt de playlist af te spelen. Via Amazon kunnen de tracks ook worden gekocht.

De ‘pLLaylist’ is eenvoudig te delen via sociale netwerken of blog/site
Met een enkele klik kunnen gebruikers de ‘pLLaylist’ doorplaatsen als interactieve widget op Hyves of eigen blogs en sites. Ook kan de ‘pLLaylist’ worden toegevoegd aan profielpagina’s op Facebook. Daarmee komen andere vrienden die ook naar Lowlands gaan ook direct in de stemming.

Maak hier je eigen pLLaylist!

Play (all) our playlists on Last.fm!

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:43:21 -0400

Playlistify wants to become your number 1 playlist hub. That means we want to add as many import and export options for your playlist. We already have 10 import options. And we offer to export playlists into Spotify, Youtube, Embed widget, Facebook app…..

Feeds, feeds, feeds! Follow your favourite artist or tag(s)

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 04:59:52 -0400

Last week I’ve implemented some RSS feeds for you. From now on it is very easy to follow an artist you like or tag you like. Every time a new playlist is uploaded with that artist or tag, it will appear in the feed. (By the way, if you don’t know what feeds are, check out this video) Just click the button you see at dedicated artist- or tag-pages:

Subscribe to the RSS-feed(s) in your favourite feedreader, iGoogle, Netvibes, make a widget out of it, whatever. Heck, you can even make a Twitterfeed bot out of it!

Happy Baking, Sharing & Discovering!

Similarity (Beta*) suggests you other cool playlists

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:21:51 -0400

Proud to have pushed this most wanted feature live: Similar playlists. From now on you can find a list of similar playlists to the one your looking at.

Check out this image for an impression:

It seems so simple. “Playlist A looks like playlist C, so they are similar, just list them dude.”

Well it turns out to be a bit thougher when it comes to machines, but after having some discussions with and getting information from Arjen & Marcel I chose to take a simple approach, based upon ‘tags/genres’. Here are some of my contemplations about a simple algorithm for calculating similar playlists.

I managed to calculate similar playlists for all the playlists in the Playlistify Directory. And, if all goes well, all fresh baked playlists will also immediately have a list of similar playlists. For you this is yet another epic reason for using Playlistify, after introducing the Twitter lists feature last week.

Now you can instantly browse and play other similar playlists to the one you baked!

Feel free to share this major development (in a tiny square box :D) with your friends and followers!

Turn your playlist or library into a Twitter List

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:59:57 -0400

A few days ago, we added the functionality to convert playlists into Twitter Lists. Now you can convert your iTunes Library or playlist, Last.fm data, Youtube playlists, Spotify playlists and We are Hunted, Soundcloud, Rhapsody, Winamp and XSPF playlists and Copy-Paste playlist texts into Twitter List and by doing so they can start following the whereabouts and adventures of bands and musicians you listen to.

From playlist to Twitter List
Whenever you bake a playlist, their curation will be added to The Playlistify Directory. From here you and your friends can connect to Twitter and add the available artists’ and bands’ offical Twitter accounts as a List to your Twitter account. By the way, the playlist page itself also has a tweetbox preview with the latest tweets.

Twitter @Anywhere also implemented
Next to adding the complete playlist as a list on Twitter, you can also decide to only follow some of the artists. This feature is possible via @Anywhere, Twitter’s new feature to add Twitter to any site. We show the Twitter hovercards which enable you to quickly follow one or more artists, just hover over the artists’ boxes on the left bottom of each playlist page.

Freebase and a collaborative spreadsheet are the sources for the bands’ and artists’ official Twitter accounts
Freebase is a large collaborative knowledge base. Playlistify uses the information available on Freebase to enrich the playlists with the official Twitter accounts. Next to supplying these Twitter accounts, Playlistify also retrieves Facebook, Myspace and official webpages via Freebase. Whenever available these are also listed on the playlist pages. In the future we are looking into which data we can commit back to the Freebase project too. If you have ideas on this I’d be happy to hear!

Furthermore the collobarotive Google Spreadsheet ‘Artist/Bands on Twitter’ managed by @Gcn1 is also a source for enriching the Playlistify Database. Great initiative!

From the 20,000 artists currently in the Playlistify Database about 5% has a Twitter account synced.

Other new cool things we do for and with your playlists

The 10th import source has been added: bake playlists from Rhapsody playlists.
Playlistify Anything bookmarklet released: select a text on a webpage containing a playlist, click the bookmarklet and bake it right away.
Embed playlists on sites, network or blog: Every playlist in the Playlistify Directory can now be embedded as an interactive widget. Just hit the <>Embed button
Map the playlists: Browse all the playlists on the map.

Happy baking, sharing and discovering!

Hometaping is killing music: LOL :D

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:19:24 -0400

Hometaping is killing music: LOL :D

The Next Web, The Video.

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:40:56 -0400

Yes! I received the video of the Playlistify presentation at The Next Web! Check it out:

And the slides:

Introducing the 'Playlistify Anything' bookmarklet

Tue, 18 May 2010 09:17:00 -0400

As of today you can turn any playlist* content you find on the web into a interactive playlist which you open in Spotify and other players, with the ‘Playlistify Anything’-bookmarklet.

Check out this 1 minute demo of the Playlistify anything bookmarklet:

Here is how it works once you have installed the bookmarklet:

Select the playlist text you want to have converted (from anywhere on the web)
Click the Playlistify It! bookmarklet in your bookmarkbar
Instantly get an interactive, embed-able, playable, Spotifyable playlist

Install the bookmarklet:

Install the bookmarklet by going to the Playlistify Tools & Goodies page and dragging the Playlistify bookmarklet button on to your bookmark bar.

* (providing you can select the text)

Spotify coming to The Netherlands - 18 may 2010

Tue, 04 May 2010 18:58:00 -0400

* Update: Spotify is now available in The Netherlands

I don’t know how to tell how delightfull I was when I read the news today that finally Spotify is coming to The Netherlands. And soon too! In only two weeks time, on May 18th 2010 already. So fellow Dutchmen: forget about the workarounds, and be happy, be very very happy!

A warm welcome to the Spotify team in Amsterdam!

The next web was superkewl.

Tue, 04 May 2010 18:43:00 -0400

Once you have a startup you suddenly see a conference from a different side. The startup side. In my case it mend not seeing any of the great keynotes, but instead meeting all kinds of kind people, people with determination, passion and open minds. Ok! Nice people, smart applications, cool webservices, it was all at The Next Web .

Thanks again Patrick for showing the 1 minute pitch contest video on day 1:

Thank you all attendees and jury for getting me do my pitch presentation. I’ve uploaded it on Slideshare but it hasn’t that much text in it:

"Was Playlistify.org down for everyone or was it just me?"

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:38:00 -0400

“Was Playlistify.org down for everyone or was it just me?”

- ~~jep, we’re down, i’ve made a stupid mistake. Hope to fix it soon. all eyes on.~~

jup, down it was. You could also call this story ‘how one extra [space] ruined the server’. Had to visit the datacentre to restore everything.

But now everything seems to be up again. Should you have any problems dont hassle to contact me @roelandp.

Ej, why not bake a playlist?

Launching a fresh Directory Home and introducing 'Featured Playlist!'

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:44:00 -0400

Yes! Today is the day of the launch of the much anticipated and much better and improved Playlistify Directory Homepage. The Playlistify Directory has just become a great jumpstart to start discovering playlists baked by other users on our platform. It features:

Discover the 10 most recent playlists
Featured playlist (more on that in a sec)
Prominent spot for the ‘Search’ bar
Recent locations overview
Small tagcloud
List with topartists
People tweeting about playlists
And some stats about the current status of the ever growing playlist database

Featured Playlist

With the introduction of the new homepage I am also happy to announce the super beta introduction of the ‘Featured Playlist’ option.

Featuring your playlist gives it a prominent spot right on the frontpage of the Playlistify Directory. Every visitor sees your playlist, and can instantly launch it and share it with their followers.

We are currently experimenting with this new feature and you can join the experiment!

Everybody can suggest a playlist to be featured by using this temporary form.

Stay tuned for more coolness and spread the word!

Did you already bake your playlist today? No? Do so now!

Yes we won a Spottie Award!

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 17:54:34 -0400

It is the time of the season… Awardseason!

Jer White, who runs the ultimate Spotify Resources blog Pansentient League organised the first ever Spotify Community Awards, dubbed ‘The Spotties’ and just announced the winners in this post on his blog.

Playlistify.org was also nominated in the category ‘Best Convertor’ and guess what… we won! Besides that we were also runner up in the ‘overall’ category. I asked Jer to also add us to the ‘Best Playlist share’ sites, since all the playlists you bake are automatically stored in the Playlistify Directory but as voted already had commenced that was not possible unfortunately…

Dutch Startup Awards

Playlistify was also nominated in the category ‘Biggest Promise’ in the Dutch Open Startup Awards. Too bad we did not win, but it was a close call.

The Next Web Paypal X Startup Rally

Playlistify is still in the running for The Next Web Paypal X Startup Rally and are having a change to win a spot on Europe’s number one Web Conference, held annually in Amsterdam and coming up in 3 weeks time again! Join us over there, come to the conference for 3 days and celebrate queensday afterwards!

As of today it is possible to embed any baked playlist from...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:20:11 -0500

As of today it is possible to embed any baked playlist from the Playlistify Directory in forms of an interactive gadget onto your site or blog. This means that you could bring your offline iTunes playlist onto Facebook and share it with your friends, or make your ‘this-months-favourites’ listing on your own blog interactive instantly by (re)-publishing it through Playlistify and embed it instantly. You can see a live example in this post, just hit the Play button to start listening.

The best about the embeddable playlist is that I scripted it with a Youtube player and single-click-copy-to-Spotify option. So you can instantly play almost any track directly through the embed or launch Spotify and start listening to the playlist instantly. By the way, we are looking into Rhapsody support at the moment.

Furthermore the playlist’s tracks have links to buying the song on Amazon, Twittering the track, link to Last.fm’s artist page and Youtube search results for the current artist. Click on the info button located on the right top to toggle more information and share options.

Start baking, sharing and discovering playlists now!

PS for the nerds: the gadget fully runs on Amazon S3, I store the playlist data and the gadget overthere, so there is no serverload at all, serving these gadgets to potentially zillions of users without a cent of pain. Well errrr,… leaving out the credit card statement here… :D

PS 2 for the nerds and others: The Youtube player script I use is not a hack or work around: It is just build upon Youtube’s own REST data API, returning JSONP responses and assuming the no.1 result has to be the track currently requested to play. It starts playing inside the Youtube JSapi enabled player and listens to the events to look for a next track after the current one stopped playing. Actually one can say the whole proces is Client-side-based as there is no server side interaction, everything is written in javascript.

Embed playlists on your site or social networks with the Playlistify Gadget

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:12:00 -0500

Start baking, sharing and discovering playlists now!

Search is here!

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:47:23 -0500

Although Playlistify hasn’t launched officially I am happy to announce that most wanted feature ‘search’ is now implemented in the Playlistify Directory! From now on it is super easy to find new playlists you like. Read more about the new feature right after this:

It was already possible for quite some time to share and discover playlists through the shorturl http://Pli.st (bit.ly powered) or to click via the Playlistify Directory from ‘tag’ to ‘tag’ (eg. all playlists tagged ‘jazz’) or view all playlists featuring artist ‘XYZ’ (e.g. all playlists featuring Miles Davis).

And a bit over a week ago I launched The Map, which makes it possible to see where playlists originally came from and discover new music on a geographic basis. That weekend also saw the light of the tagcloud.

But I am really hyper hyper about the all new searchfield, present on all pages:

Searching the Playlistify Directory makes it fricking easy to find music you want to hear, or give you an easy start to find a playlist for the coming hours. Almost any text the Playlistify Database has, is now indexed and reachable through the search function.

Check out the results for:

The search functionality of the Playlistify Directory is powered by the opensource Sphinx Search Engine, a great, fast and rather easy to implement search engine, with php API endpoint to easy build upon!

Now go and bake your playlist »

Playlistify.org launched in super early beta mode

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:03:58 -0500

Playlistify.org launched last week in super early beta mode. Our service let’s you convert your playlists into a playable one for Spotify. Furthermore you can share your web playable playlist online with your friends through our supershort http://Pli.st url and discover great playlists in the playlist directory.

Follow this blog or our Twitter/playlistify to stay up 2 date on new developments. You can read more about Playlistify.org two core functionalities over at the About page.

Developers: We will soon release an API which makes it possible to add our service to your own site.

Bake your playlist now >