Over the past few weekends I’ve been working on a little side project called the Playlist Builder Library (or PBL for short). The Playlist Builder Library is a Python library for creating and manipulating playlists. It’s sort of like remix for playlists. With PBL you can take songs from playlists, albums, artists, genres and flexibly combined them, rearrange them, filter them and sort them into new playlists.
For example, here’s a PBL program that creates radio station of today’s top hits but guarantees that every 4th song is either by Sia or Katy Perry:
Here’s the resulting playlist:
That’s 5 lines a code to create a non-trivial playlist.
PBL supports all sorts of sources for tracks such as Spotify playlists, top tracks from artists, albums, genres, the extremely flexible and powerful Echo Nest playlisting API. These sources can be manipulated in all sorts of interesting ways. Here are a couple more examples:
You can filter all the songs in ‘Your favorite coffeehouse’ to get just the lowest energy songs:
coffee = PlaylistSource('coffeehouse', ucoffee_house)
low_energy_coffee = AttributeRangeFilter(coffee, 'echonest.energy', max_val=.5)
You an combine your favorite playlists in a single one:
playlist_names = ['Your Favorite Coffeehouse', 'Acoustic Summer','Acoustic Covers', 'Rainy Day'] all = DeDup(Alternate([Sample(PlaylistSource(n), 10) for n in playlist_names]))
Even sophisticated tasks are really easy. For instance, imagine dad is on a roadtrip with daughter. They agree to alternate between dad’s music and daughter’s music. Dad is selfish, so he makes a playlist that alternates the longest cool jazz tracks with the shortest teen party playlists with this 3 line script:
teen_party = First(Sorter(PlaylistSource('Teen Party'), 'duration'), 10) jazz_classics = Last(Sorter(PlaylistSource('Jazz Classics'), 'duration'), 10) both = Alternate([teen_party, Reverse(jazz_classics)])
Here’s the result
Note that the average duration of Teen Party songs is much less than 3 minutes, while the average duration of Jazz Classics is above 6 minutes. Selfish dad gets to listen to his music twice as long with this jazz-skewing playlist.
There’s a whole lot of nifty things that can be done with PBL. If you are a Python programmer with an itch for creating new playlists check it out. The docs are online at http://pbl.readthedocs.org/ and the source is at https://github.com/plamere/pbl.
PBL is pretty modular so it is easy to add new sources and manipulators, so if you have an idea or two for changes let me know or just send me a pull request.
