Tag Archives: firefox

How to Manage Your Personal Spotify Collection (Updated)

Need an easy way to manage and keep track of all your music on Spotify? Once you’ve added more than a dozen or so albums to your Spotify list, it soon becomes difficult to manage them as they become one big long list in Spotify. One option might be to use blank playlist dividers, but this doesn’t let you nest, say a 60’s Rock and Roll folder in your Rock folder. Using one of the many playlist sites doesn’t really help either, as they’re all designed for sharing with others, not for managing your own music. So, how do you manage your collection of favourite albums on Spotify? One easy way is to do this: use your web browser’s bookmark tool.

Since everything in Spotify (albums, CD singles, individual songs etc.) all have a unique URL, you can think of an album as a website. Then using e.g. the Firefox bookmark tool, you can create multiple folders for your music and organize them by genre, by artist, or however you want.

You can take advantage of the browser’s bookmark features such as search, export, tags and keywords. If you use Xmarks (previously known as Foxmarks), your Spotify collection is synchronized across all your computers. You can even use Xmarks to share your music collection with friends!


To add an album:

  1. Search for the album or single in Spotify.
  2. Drag and drop the album (pick up from the cover art) onto your desktop or any folder. This creates an Internet Shortcut to the album.
  3. Open your browser’s bookmark manager (e.g. Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks)
  4. Drag and drop the Internet Shortcut into your browser bookmarks.

Firefox Plugins

Here’s what my Firefox browser looks like on my home PC, showing four add-ons I think are essential:

  • Foxmarks – I dithered about adding this for a few weeks but now I have it installed on my home PC, work PC, and EeePC. Foxmarks syncs and backs up your bookmarks across multiple computers, so I now never need to worry about losing a bookmark or being on the wrong PC. Best thing is you can set up different profiles e.g. oneset of bookmarks for work and another for home.
  • Greasemonkey – This lets you install scripts that overlay or modify webpages. I had this installed before but didn’t really use it; I’ve reinstalled it now though to make use of an excellent script that ties Last.fm to Spotify. Band names and tracks now have a little green note next to them on Last.fm – clicking on the note opens a search in Spotify:

  • MyScrobble – Made for Last.fm Hack Day 2008, the Universal Scrobbler scrobbles the unscrobbable: for example tracks from a band’s MySpace page.
  • Twitterfox -One of several Twitter add-ons, Twitterfox checks you twitter feed every X minutes and notifies you of any new tweets (much like the Gmail plugin). You can then click the little blue t to open a window to read adn reply to your tweets. It’s quite unobtrusive and much more SFW than visiting Twitter pages directly:

Feedly – Feedly Now!

It’s a weekend of 2.0 bootstrapping for me and my new favourite firefox plugin is feedly, a super-slick addon that takes your Google Reader feeds and pretties them all up into a sweet custom magazine view:
There’s loads of configuration and view options, and it all syncs perfectly with my other readers on other devices (vanilla Google Reader on my G1, Feedly on my work PC etc). Set-up is easy, more so if you already use Google Reader.