Down the musical garden path

A while ago I published a little C# app called Spautofy – it awkwardly interfaces with Spotify to try create an ‘infinite mixtape’ – start playing a song and it will queue songs which are similar to those which came before it. The idea was to mimic algorithmically the way people jump from song to song, constructing a sort of accidental narrative as they go. Unfortunately, the way it tried to control Spotify was so hacky it was really unreliable, so not as useful as I’d like.

But, it’s a theme which still really interests me. I’ve just published a variation on it – Spotipath. This (at the moment) is a little Python script which plays on the mixtape idea – taking a source song and crunching through it to incrementally produce a playlist with that same meandering quality. The version on GitHub at the moment is really incomplete and inefficient – it was an evening’s attempt to port the gubbins of Spautofy to Python. The idea is to expand on this and make a user-friendly web frontend to it – but the code is sitting there now. Feel free to try running it yourself – it has a couple of dependencies on wrappers for the Last.fm and Spotify metadata APIs – and you’ll need a Last.fm API key to get it running.