Spotify’s Related Artists tab may act as a basic music recommendation service, but it’s left to the 3rd-party webapps to provide a more personal experience. Sites like Spotibot, Spotiseek and even ShareMyPlaylists all offer a way to generate a playlist for you, either based on an artist name or by checking what you’ve been listening to via Last.fm. A cool new service – truShuffle – has just launched that raises the recommendation game. truShuffle is different as it auto-fills a live playlist of recommended music while you listen.

Mashing up Spotify with Last.fm and AllMusic, truShuffle has several unique features you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll need a Last.fm account to use it, as well as a truShuffle login to get started.

Once you’ve registered, make sure you’ve enabled scrobbling from Spotify (Edit > Preferences) then login to truShuffle. You’ll see a custom page that keeps track of the music you listen to and songs added to your personal playlist. Click the Spotify logo to open the playlist in Spotify, then click Subscribe to keep track of it. When you first do this you’ll see that there’s nothing in the playlist.

Now for the clever part. Listen to some music in Spotify. As you play the tunes, truShuffle automatically starts adding suggested tracks to your personal playlist. The truShuffle webpage updates to show you what’s being added, including an indication of why it was added. The Now Playing section also provides lots of interesting info on the current song, including biography, genre, mood, and links to other similar bands.

If you want to fine-tune what gets added to the playlist, use the Settings sliders to adjust a similarity percentage for either artist and track.

truShuffle creator Hugo Lindström tells me that the service is still in beta, but it seems to work perfectly already and has a rare attention to detail. There’s an informative set of help pages and the overall design and graphical polish is to be commended. I asked Hugo what future plans he has for truShuffle:

For the future I plan to integrate moods so that you can set it to Experimental Dub or Energetic, for example. This way you can do things like have truShuffle DJ at parties. This frees you up from spending time behind the PC and lets you enjoy the actual party instead!

You do need to keep truShuffle open in a browser tab for it to work its magic, but Hugo has plans for an automated service to get around this too (and Mac users, see the comments below for a great tip from @danielstoker). All-in-all, truShuffle is a slick and innovative service that’s perfect for any Spotify user looking for something new to listen to.