Duncan Geere's Blog
Five secret Spotify features
14 July 11
Leave a commentWelcome to the Spotify party, USA. Sorry, the keg's pretty much empty, you guys brought booze right?
As we're polite and considerate hosts, we're ready to share our deepest darkest secrets about Spotify with you. Here's five quick power-user tricks that most Brits don't know about Spotify, so you'll be able to impress that cute British girl or guy over in the corner with your mastery of something that you would otherwise be mostly clueless about.
Pagedown in results
First up, finding the song you want. Spotify has an annoying habit of only giving you the most popular editions of a track. If you want the whole list in search results, you can click a track in the list and hit the Pagedown key to get more. Keep holding it, and eventually you'll get to the bottom, far faster than through scrolling.Ctrl-F to filter
Once you've got your nice long list of tracks, finding what you want in it by eye can be a bit of a pain. So hit Ctrl-F to bring up an enormously useful filter. Try it on a search for Label:EMI for Radiohead, for example. Much easier than scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.Scrobble from Spotify
You guys have Pandora, right? Lovely. But it doesn't learn your taste when you're not using it, so UK-based Last.fm pretty much blows it out of the water. Get yourself a Last.fm account, head to Spotify's preferences screen and put in your details, and every track you play will be logged for your perusal. That way, when you know what you want to listen to you can go to Spotify, and when you don't you can go to Last.fm. You can also import your loved tracks and recommendations back into Spotify using Spotibot. The perfect partnership.Search through other people's playlists
Spotify appears to have pretty much stopped development on new features since its big social launch about a year ago, and one thing the service is crying out for is a way to easily discover playlists that over people have created. Happily ShareMyPlaylists.com has stepped into the breach, and offers a nice way of searching through playlists that people have uploaded to the site.Backup your playlists
There's always a chance -- not an enormous one but a chance nonetheless -- that something will go wrong on Spotify's database servers and all your playlists will be irrecoverably lost. That might not matter to you, but once you've gone through a year or two of Spotify and you've accrued playlists that you associate with particular moments in your life, you might want to back them up. It's simple. Select all the tracks in the playlist with Ctrl-A, and drag it into a Word document or an email, and voila -- backup made.Finally you're probably going to want some listening material, aren't you? Here's five awesome playlists to start you off, and if you want more then you can follow @duncangeere or @UKTJPRDJ on Twitter -- I regularly tweet Spotify links on both accounts.
Losing My Edge (every band mentioned in the song in the order they're mentioned)
Pitchfork 200 Greatest Songs of the 60s
Rough Trade Albums of 2010
Sunny Mornings
1001 Songs You Must hear Before You DieWant to join? We have free Spotify invites!
Photo
Flickr.com/woodleywonderworks
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Five secret Spotify features (Wired UK)
via wired.co.uk
Flickr - projectbrainsaver
www.flickr.com
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