Notes on sorting music

Background

As a bit of background, I used to have an enormous music library (some 650GB of mixed quality MP3 files) stored on a local server that I could akwardly stream from (if the stars aligned).

Now this kind of setup is great, however there are a good few downsides to this approach, namely…

• Audio quality is fixed at whatever you originally sourced the files at
• Organisation and metadata is an ongoing nightmare
• Bitrot is definitely a thing
• Tastes change, but the library is mostly static
• Keeping up with new releases is a full time job
• Pruning files is yet another job in itself
• Most of it just isn’t listened to regularly
• There’s no good middle ground between singles and albums
• Music is kind of awkward to obtain versus TV shows and movies

So, with this what I decided to do was to work my way through each and every artist in my library, adding what I liked to a Spotify playlist that I’d export out every few months as a form of backup just in case anything happened with my account or Spotify at large.

Exporting

Exporting your liked lists isn’t the simplest of things.

There are a number of tools out there but the one I keep coming back to is exportify. Once you’re logged in you’re presented with your playlists and then you simply download the ‘Liked’ list and you’re given a handy-dandy liked.csv that we’re able to actually work on.

Processing

As with most data and lists I work on, I’ve streamlined (ish) this process into an unweildy script. Inside this you’ll find how it converts CSV input into a reasonably coherent, sorted markdown table.

Future expansion

Currently my library file holds no details regarding track metadata outside of Artist, Title and a link, it’s just a list (hey, we like those!). At some point however I’d like to be able to append genres and styles to the list such as the following.