Compare Musicbee & Spotify playlists

[fnky]

I've got two sets of playlists that I use, on spotify and in musicbee. I've been wondering whether there is an easy way to compare the two playlists to find uniques so I can sync them. I've been messing around converting m3u files and the spotify playlists to csv files and then formatting and comparing the lists in google sheets. But that is a massive pain in the ass to do for multiple playlists. Does anyone know if this can be done in a more efficient way?

[Freddy Barker]

I've got two sets of playlists that I use, on spotify and in musicbee. I've been wondering whether there is an easy way to compare the two playlists to find uniques so I can sync them. I've been messing around converting m3u files and the spotify playlists to csv files and then formatting and comparing the lists in google sheets. But that is a massive pain in the ass to do for multiple playlists. Does anyone know if this can be done in a more efficient way?

I think if you export to csv you can try using this FREE tool:-

https://www.tunemymusic.com

[Zak]

Looks like that site will only convert playlists between platforms, not compare two different playlists.

OP, if you can post an example of a Spotify CSV and a Musicbee playlist you want to compare (on Dropbox or similar), I can try to throw something together for you.

[fnky]

Looks like that site will only convert playlists between platforms, not compare two different playlists.

OP, if you can post an example of a Spotify CSV and a Musicbee playlist you want to compare (on Dropbox or similar), I can try to throw something together for you.

Indeed. I've found various of these services and they all fell short one way or the other for what I need. Uploaded what you asked
here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r589q4cwx3a67d9/AAA-rZ1vUryHQxcbUMoLN8Xla?dl=0

[Dryst]

I also have a need to sync playlists with Spotify.  I am currently a subscriber to Soundiiz and make use of this.  What Soundiiz is good at is synchronizing playlists from one online streaming site to another.  It also supports syncing local playlists, but my experience with this has not been good at all.

What works best for me is syncing from last.fm to Spotify, so I use this the most.  In my case, it syncs last.fm tracks that I love with a new Spotify play list. It's not a general playlist sync, but syncing loved tracks gets me closer to what I want.  It has a fairly high success rate, but it is not perfect.  I use the Spotify app to verify and clean-up the newly sync'd playlist.

[Zak]

Uploaded what you asked
here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r589q4cwx3a67d9/AAA-rZ1vUryHQxcbUMoLN8Xla?dl=0

Hi, I just saw this now.
I'll see what I can do in the next few days.

[fnky]

Uploaded what you asked
here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r589q4cwx3a67d9/AAA-rZ1vUryHQxcbUMoLN8Xla?dl=0

Hi, I just saw this now.
I'll see what I can do in the next few days.

I was wondering whether you got around to setting something up, if not, I'll be moving forward with excel. I appreciate the effort either way.

[Zak]

Hi. Sorry for the late reply - life got in the way.

I've created a simple program that will take two lists of tracks and show the differences between them.
I emphasise that this is very simple - I threw it together in a few hours so it doesn't have robust error checking etc.

This is what it looks like in use:



This simple example uses the tracklist from the the Crow soundtrack.
I've exported the tag values to a file and simulated some differences by editing two artist names and removing one completely.

Basic usage:

1. Specify the file path of your exported Spotify CSV file on the left.
    (this can also be any text file that has tag values as "artist - track" on each line)
2. Select all the files from your playlist in MusicBee and copy the <artist> - <title> tags to the clipboard.
3. Click Paste Tracks to display the MusicBee tracks on the right.
4. Tracks that appear in one list but not the other are highlighted.

I've done it this way because a playlist exported from MusicBee doesn't contain any tag values - it's just a list of file paths.
Because a file name can't be relied upon to be formatted in a specific way it's easier to compare against tag values copied from MusicBee itself.
The program expects them to be copied in the format <artist> - <title>, so you should set your MusicBee Preferences to copy them that way.

To provide some tolerance for minor differences, comparison of track details is case insensitive and only compares alphanumeric characters.
So:
"Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters" will match with "Ray Parker Jr - Ghostbusters" and
"Bachman-Turner Overdrive - Takin' Care of Business" will match with "Bachman Turner Overdrive - Takin Care Of Business"

The Grouped checkboxes will group each list by the first letter of the specified sorting column.
The Reset button just clears any previous tracks from both lists.
The Artist <> Title button swaps the two values around in case the loaded file was saved with the tags that way.

Hopefully it saves you some time. I don't want to spend a lot of time maintaining or updating this, but let me know how it goes.

Download link:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Auf1j9D0P6KYhhqitfHWts0lqWAG?e=3UMsj8

It doesn't need installing - just unzip and run.
The only system requirement is .NET 4.5.

[fnky]

Thank you! Works great . Definitely will save a lot of time into organizing this shitshow of playlists.

Differences in the playlists could be improved by ignoring the term " - Original Mix" behind certain songs. Spotify likes to randomly add this to some songs. Spotify also has the tendency to not display both collaborating artists, only one of them. So it'd also be helpfull if it could pass the test when the spotify artist matches with either musicbee artist a, b, or c.

How do you create a little program like this? I've got some basic programming experience, maybe I can look into it myself.

[Freddy Barker]

Looks like that site will only convert playlists between platforms, not compare two different playlists.

OP, if you can post an example of a Spotify CSV and a Musicbee playlist you want to compare (on Dropbox or similar), I can try to throw something together for you.

Seems that any of the streaming platforms featured can be converted to csv or text, then compared using the new tool?? So, with a little bit of further coding / tweaking would be a very useful addition to synch management...

[Zak]

Thank you! Works great . Definitely will save a lot of time into organizing this shitshow of playlists.

Yay!  

Differences in the playlists could be improved by ignoring the term " - Original Mix" behind certain songs. Spotify likes to randomly add this to some songs. Spotify also has the tendency to not display both collaborating artists, only one of them. So it'd also be helpfull if it could pass the test when the spotify artist matches with either musicbee artist a, b, or c.

I'll update it to accept a list of user-configurable terms you want to ignore when comparing tracks. I should be able to do that this weekend.

How do you create a little program like this? I've got some basic programming experience, maybe I can look into it myself.

Written in VB.NET in Visual Studio Community Edition. For a whlie Microsoft has kindly provided an excellent IDE for free that can be used to create basically anything.
I'll include the source code with the update, so you can work through it.

Seems that any of the streaming platforms featured can be converted to csv or text, then compared using the new tool?? So, with a little bit of further coding / tweaking would be a very useful addition to synch management...

Yep. It's just comparing lists of <artist> - <title> values. For fnky's use case (i.e Spotify vs. MusicBee) it was just easier that the first one comes from a file and the second one from the clipboard. I'll expand the options a bit by making it possible to compare two two files or two lists from MusicBee.

[Freddy Barker]

Yep. It's just comparing lists of <artist> - <title> values. For fnky's use case (i.e Spotify vs. MusicBee) it was just easier that the first one comes from a file and the second one from the clipboard. I'll expand the options a bit by making it possible to compare two two files or two lists from MusicBee.

That would be great, and most useful, thank you 

[Zak]

A quick [partial] update

* Updated the program to allow either track list to be read from a text file or pasted from clipboard values.
* Renamed it from Playlist Comparer to Track List Comparer to match its broader usage scenarios.
* Program will remember if it was maximised when it was last closed.


New link:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Auf1j9D0P6KYhhtkgf_vRJddyApA


When time permits, I'll also include options to ignore certain terms when comparing.
At that point I'll also tidy up the Visual Studio project files and include those.

[Zak]

Spotify also has the tendency to not display both collaborating artists, only one of them. So it'd also be helpfull if it could pass the test when the spotify artist matches with either musicbee artist a, b, or c.

Remember this program doesn't have any concept of artists or titles.
It is only comparing text.

Having said that...

I think it could be easy to implement, so do you mean a multiple artist tag in MusicBee separated by a semi-colon?

e.g.
Giorgio Moroder; Philip Oakey - Together in Electric Dreams

[fnky]

Remember this program doesn't have any concept of artists or titles.
It is only comparing text.

Having said that...

I think it could be easy to implement, so do you mean a multiple artist tag in MusicBee separated by a semi-colon?

e.g.
Giorgio Moroder; Philip Oakey - Together in Electric Dreams

Yup thats exactly what I mean. Except displaying artist often shows with the ampersand, but I think it stores the contributing artists with a semi-colon in the tags. Not sure though.
The program may not be comparing artists or titles perse. Yet it is comparing lists, which are made exclusively from artists or track titles, right? You could add a "includes" rather than an "is equal to" comparison, which is what I was thinking.