UPDATE: both apps described below are currently offline
Two great new web-based applications have arrived to complement Spotify: Spotify Collections, an online personal playlist manager and SpotifiTunes, an app that uploads your artist list from iTunes and creates a webpage with links to Spotify.
Spotifitunes maps your iTunes library to Spotify to create a personal list of artists. To setup, just upload a file from iTunes which the site then analyses and creates an alphabetical smartlist of all your artists in iTunes. Click a letter to expand the list then click an artist’s name to seach for that artist in Spotify:
You can even specify a URL for you collection, for example here’s developer Phil Nash‘s collection at http://spotifitunes.philnash.co.uk/phil. I don’t do iTunes so can’t test this out properly myself, but from what I’ve seen (and the feedback on Twitter) it seems to be an invaluable app for users of iTunes and Spotify. There are a few glitches (such as duplicate entries, how it handles artists with “The” in their name), but the site is still an early alpha so expect to see updates and improvements soon.
Web-based personal playlist manager that lets you create and share your playlists. Once registered, you can easily build a list of albums: the site groups these by artist to provide a neat web-based playlist management tool.
To use, first select from one of the 23 top-level genres then create a new collection (you cannot create new genres yet, unfortunately). You can then paste Spotify URLs or URIs and the tool automatically gets the artist and album name then adds it to your collection. Here’s one I made called Discophonica:
Clicking on an artist’s name expands the selection so that you can choose which album or playlist you want. There’s a social networking aspect to the site too: all collections are public and anyone can add a comment to your collection. You can also add any collection to a list of favourites. There is also an ability to add custom playlists (in this case you are prompted to manually enter some details).
Being web-based, adding your albums to Spotify Collections makes them searchable from any PC and you don’t need to worry about backups. It’s a good alternative to using a bookmark manager (my prefered way to manage lots of playlists) and is definitely much more advanced and usable than Spotify’s own in-built playlist manager (mostly because there isn’t one). Developer Alan Moore is actively working on updates and improvements, so let him know if you have an suggestions.