Ultranormal

Tag: rdio

  • Kevin’s Year in Music: 2015

    It’s been a great year for actual music, but a sad one for me personally. Why? Rdio died. I loved Rdio for years – even when I was working at a music startup building a competing service, I still loved Rdio. And now it’s gone. I tried Google Music, and had to give up on it because it lacks any idea of social, and does some very strange things with explicit lyrics. Now I’m on Spotify and it’s all right. It’s not perfect. It’s definitely not Rdio – but it’ll do.

    Enough sadness, let’s get on to the music! Last year, I just threw together a list of the albums I liked and put them in three categories. That was a cop out and saved me from having to pick a single album. This year, I’m picking a single album that is my favorite of the year! And then a couple more than I really liked.

    My album of the year is…

    Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit by Courtney Barnett! It’s funny. It’s fun to sing along with, and the songs are actually about things. This album came out early on this year and I kept going back to it all year.

    It was really hard to pick just one album but I did it. Courtney’s biggest competition was from an artist that my friend Bryan told me about – Ghostpoet. His album, Shedding Skin, is fantastic. It reminds me a lot of Massive Attack, which is always a good thing. You should listen to it, a lot.

    There were a lot of really good albums that came out this year. So many that my Kevin’s 2015 Favorites playlist has 340 songs in it and if you listened to it all at once, it would take 23 hours and 29 minutes. So, get started!

  • Importing Rdio Playlists (and Your Collection) Into Google Music

    My beloved Rdio is dying, and soon. They ran out of money, sold all their assets in a fire sale and have given their users about a week to find a new music home. I tried Apple Music, but quickly ran into limitations (song limit, my patience with their awful UI, horrible apps for importing songs, etc). Asking around, it looked like Google Music was the next best option.

    And then the problem was, how to I get almost 5 years of musical history from Rdio into Google Music? All those favorites playlists from 2011-2015, the road trip playlists, the special occasion playlists… all of those will just disappear.

    It took a lot of experimentation, but I found a way to export my playlists (and entire collection) from Rdio to Google Music. Here’s what you need (sorry, this is going to require some Terminal time):

    • First, you need to install the Rdio Enhancer Chrome Add-on.
    • Sign up for the Google Music free trial.
    • Install gmusic-playlist – it’s a python library for interacting with Google Music. It has some dependencies, so you’ll need to follow the README instructions carefully.

    After you’ve gotten those installed, you need to do the following to save your playlists and collection in a format that’ll work with the importer:

    • Go to Rdio in Chrome.
    • Click Favorites.
    • You should see an Export CSV button. Click it. Depending on the size of your library, this could take a while. It’s going to generate CSV files for your entire collection. My 35,000 song collection took 3 CSV files, and about 5 minutes to generate and download them. Chrome will probably ask you if this site can download multiple files. Say yes and wait for all of them to download (15,000 songs per file).
    • Once you have all those files, it’s time to do playlists!

    For each playlist you want to save:

    • Click its link in the left nav bar.
    • Click the 3 dots in a circle button (next to the share button), then “Extras”, then “Export to CSV”.
    • That’ll download another CSV file.
    • You should open up each CSV and delete the first line (the header) or you’ll end up with “Did She Mention My Name” by Gordon Lightfoot in all of your playlists. If that doesn’t bother you, go ahead skip this step.

    Now that you have your collection and all the files you want to save, it’s time to set up the gmusic-playlist importer. After you unzip it, open the folder and then open preferences.py in your favorite text editor and make the following changes:

    • username should be your google login email address.
    • Change the track_info_order line to look like this: track\_info\_order = \['title','artist','album','trackNumber'\] (the only change is to change “songid” to “trackNumber”).
    • Change allow_duplicates to True.
    • Change search_personal_library to False.
    • Save the file.

    Now you can follow the gmusic-playlist directions to import all those CSVs. Google Music has a limit of 1,000 songs per playlist, so your collection will be broken up, but at least you’ll have all your songs!

    Update: I tried to like Google Music. I really did. But, it has some fatal flaws:

    • Their new releases page is bad and not updated with actual new releases.
    • There’s no social at all. It’s awful.
    • The Web UI is just broken enough to be really frustrating, and all the web apps for it are hamstrung by the web’s brokenness.
    • They do very strange things with explicit lyrics.

    So, I was going to update this post with instructions on how to import your official Rdio export into Google Music, but… don’t do that.

    I’m trying out Spotify Premium again for the first time since I started using Rdio, and they’ve paid attention. Social is better. Sharing is better. The queue is persistent between sessions. They have more music than Rdio did, or that Google Music has. Their new releases page is actually mostly up to date.

    Instead of using this process to import things to Google Music, use the official Spotify Rdio Import tool. It takes about five minutes and works really well.

  • May 3 – New Music Tuesday

    I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but here’s the list of albums I gleaned from today’s new releases on Rdio. I’ll try to come back and update them once I’ve actually listened to them, but I’m a busy guy, so I’ll probably forget. Here’s the queue as it stands right now:

    There are some other things in the queue, but I have to go hop in the shower and get to work. I’ll try to hop back in and add other new stuff I find worth listening to and update the guesses with the results. Happy new music tuesday!

    What else should I be listening to?

  • New Music Tuesday!

    Tuesdays are new music day (when all the new releases come out), and for the past several months, I’ve religiously gone through the 20+ pages of new releases looking for the little gems that slip through the cracks or the albums that make my week. I usually post a couple to twitter, but hey, I have a blog, why not keep them for posterity?

    So, for 4/12/2011, here are my new release finds:

    • Hit After Hit by Sonny & The Sunsets – Moody surf rock with a touch of Brian Jonestown Massacre (without the self-indulgent drug-fueled stuff – although I can’t guarantee that drugs weren’t involved in the making of the album).
    • Two Against One / Black by Danger Mouse – It’s just two songs, but the maestro is working with Jack White and Norah Jones. These two tracks are great and would be at home on either the next Broken Bells album or a Zero 7 album. Great trippy stuff.
    • Nine Types of Light by TV On The Radio – I’ve always wanted to like this band but they’ve always been more art than rock. But from the first song on this album, the pretense has been replaced by kicked asses and soul. It all comes together in that first song: horns, guitars, and vocals.
    • And it’s not really a new release, but nyctaper released a fantastic show from Explosions in the Sky yesterday that contains a sneak peek at their new album (plus all your favorites). Totally worth downloading and cherishing forever.
    • This one isn’t “new” but it’s new to me (after hearing them a couple times on one of the CBC Radio 3 podcasts), but Hooded Fang are awesome!

    I’ll try to update this post as I find more, but these should keep you busy for a while!

    PS – Don’t forget, we’re still hiring!