Sharing playlists in the cloud?

January 13, 2011 8:25 PM

So what's the best way to share mixes these days?

I mean, I know a million sites to which you can upload files, but is there some way of ensuring that they make it into a recipient's iTunes already grouped in a specifically-ordered playlist? I don't want to just merge a bunch of songs into one long track, either. And yeah, I'm familiar (in theory, anyway) with iTunes' 'export as xml' method, but come on....There must be a better way, there just must!

posted by samac to computers & internet (15 answers total)

I know this doesn't fulfull your download to iTunes requirements, but in case no one has a better answer, there's Mixtape.me. Streaming playlists, not downloadable and limited to what they can dig up online, but pretty cool nonetheless!
posted by smirkette at 8:31 PM on January 13, 2011

Not everyone uses iTunes, because you know, the terribleness.

This works for me:

1) Decide on an order.
2) Set metadata of all tracks to have the same album name (ie, drjimmy11's mix) and track numbers for the order you want. This way it will play nice with any decent music software.
3) Zip it up and upload to dropbox, rapidshare or similar.

Bonus points: Run all the tracks through a normalizer so there are no drastic volume shifts.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:55 PM on January 13, 2011

(With this method it won't be a "playlist" but it will be an album with tracks in order, which is more or less the same thing.)
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:57 PM on January 13, 2011

and track numbers for the order you want

make sure numbers 1-9 are indicated as follows:

01
02
03
04

... and so on.
posted by philip-random at 9:00 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is there a specific person that you're wanting to send this to that you know has itunes? Because the logical answer would be to make a playlist, save it as a .m3u, put it in a folder with all of the songs, make sure the playlist knows they're all in the folder, zip it, and send it.

But iTunes sort of doesn't play nicely with .m3u files. Honestly, I'd go with making a fake album as drjimmy11 has said. That seems to be the most compatible way to get this done.

Really, your better method would be to not use iTunes.
posted by theichibun at 9:02 PM on January 13, 2011

Man though I was hoping to avoid messing up the metadata like that....I'm kinda anal when it comes to tagging, admittedly. And yeah, most of the people I was thinking of have iTunes; I didn't want to make them deal with m3u.
posted by samac at 9:48 PM on January 13, 2011

Soundcloud will allow you to do this for a single person pretty well.

I use 8tracks for sharing mixes with a bunch of people, though there's no DLing.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:19 PM on January 13, 2011

If you want to do it without messing up the metadata, what I do when my friend sends me playlists is download the zipped file of all the songs, add them to my itunes, and then go to the "Recently added" smart playlist that I've set up. Sort by date added, and all the playlist songs are right there, ready to be selected and added to a playlist. It would require a bit more work on the part of the person you're sending to, though. And on a second look at your question, I don't think they would come out in the specific order you want. Is there a reason you're averse to the "export as .xml" option?
posted by you zombitch at 10:45 PM on January 13, 2011

The correct way is one large mp3 with a cue sheet giving correct metadata and this will ensure continuous playback through the mixes.

Soundcloud is the DJs' preferred choice but that too is a single file solution.

The problem is that iTunes tends not to play nicely with the existing standard solutions to this issue. m3u would work perfectly otherwise. If you insist on catering to iTunes users, you might have to mess up the album ID3 tag to get this to work and even then I have no idea how it handles gapless playback these days.
posted by turkeyphant at 4:15 AM on January 14, 2011

Just to give everyone a better idea of what I'm looking for, I just came across this app which looks absolutely perfect; it's expired though so I can't launch it, argh...
posted by samac at 11:33 AM on January 14, 2011

I'm not sure what the proper MeFi etiquette is about glomming on to a question like this, but I want to do exactly what samac wants to do...except I'm really dumb.

How do you set metadata?

Why is this something people don't want to do? Does it screw up the way files are stored and read by iTunes?
posted by neroli at 5:54 PM on January 15, 2011

First off the etiquette. You're fine as long as it's on topic. And you're being on topic so don't worry about it.

For me, the metadata needs to be right because it's an easy way to organize the music. I'm reorganizing my stuff right now and it's amazing how many songs I have multiple copies of because the metadata is wrong and someone sent it to me and I got it without realizing I already had it.

How you set the metadata depends on what program you're using. Most of the time you can right click on the song and there's an option in the menu there.
posted by theichibun at 12:05 PM on January 16, 2011

samac: "Just to give everyone a better idea of what I'm looking for, I just came across this app which looks absolutely perfect; it's expired though so I can't launch it, argh.."

Surely then you can just use XSPF playlists? If iTunes has some issue with them too, than AppleScript should be a simple solution too?

When iTunes has "playlists", does that not mess up the metadata at all? If that's the case, what mechanism is built in for sharing playlists in iTunes?
posted by turkeyphant at 6:11 AM on January 17, 2011

turkeyphant: Surely then you can just use XSPF playlists? If iTunes has some issue with them too, than AppleScript should be a simple solution too?

When iTunes has "playlists", does that not mess up the metadata at all? If that's the case, what mechanism is built in for sharing playlists in iTunes?

Haven't really looked into XSPF, since it isn't among the various formats supported by iTunes for exporting/importing playlists (though of course, google shows a number of conversion utilities available). As far as I know, iTunes can only export playlist files as m3u, m3u8, xml, and text. I'm a little confused by your question- why would putting tracks into a playlist mess with the metadata?

And yeah, this script has been pretty handy. I was wondering if there were any other methods out there, though. I'm just surprised that such a popular media player doesn't support this sort of task better.
posted by samac at 5:16 PM on January 20, 2011

Putting tracks into a playlist won't mess with the metadata. What will is the other method people suggested, making a "new album" with tracks to make sure they stay in the right order without having to mess with playlists at all.
posted by theichibun at 6:19 AM on January 21, 2011