Things That Work: Soundiiz

A few months ago, around the time that the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect the Untied States, I began playing a weekly round of Name That Tune with my family. The premise is simple: I create a playlist with a variety of songs, and then the rest of the family attempts to guess, within the first 90 seconds of the song, the song’s title and artist.

Prior to the start of these games, I was primarily using Apple Music for all of my music-streaming needs. It wasn’t perfect, but in general everything I was looking for was present in that ecosystem. However, as I began to put playlists together for the NTT games, I quickly decided that I was going to need an alternative to improve the workflow. Apple Music doesn’t have a good web or Linux client, and I didn’t feel like using my old MacBook Pro for all of the work. Plus, I was getting fed up with Apple Music’s playlist system. I briefly looked at YouTube Music/Google Music, but quickly decided that was also not going to work, and so I switched to Spotify.

Now that I was relatively happy with the app and workflow, I began creating 1-2 playlists a week. However, I quickly found that keeping track of all of the songs that I had already used was painful. I had to either rely solely on memory, or switch between all of the previous playlists to check if a song had been used previously. There had to be a better solution. Ideally, I wanted a way to export CSV files from Spotify, compile them into a single LibreOffice spreadsheet, and then have an easy lookup table on my side monitor while I worked on playlists. Of course, that couldn’t have just been built into the Spotify UI. That would have been too easy. So, I began searching for a solution, assuming that I was not the first person to want to do this. And I was right…

Enter Soundiiz. Weird name, I know. I had actually ran across the service a few months prior, but completely forgot about it. Soundiiz advertises that they have the ability to sync playlists and favorites between platforms, and at the time, I didn’t need that functionality (I’ve since tested it out briefly, and I was underwhelmed by the performance). However, they also offer playlist export in, you guessed it… CSV! Which is exactly what I needed. And so, I signed up for an account, synced my Spotify playlists, and the rest is history.

Now, my procedure for creating NTT playlists is pretty simple. I first visit Soundiiz, and export the previous game’s playlist, which I then import into a master spreadsheet that contains all of the songs that I’ve previously used, along with the date used, artist, album, etc. It’s still a little time-intensive, but now I only ever have a single list to compare against, instead of switching between all of the previous playlists (currently at 12 and counting).

There are a host of other features that Soundiiz claims, though I’ve never actually tried any of the others out (other than what I discussed above). If you listen to a lot of music, or switch between multiple platforms, it’s worth quickly browsing through their feature list. I personally could see the playlist sync being useful in the future, especially if it becomes more robust.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload (Day 51/100). You can join in yourself by visiting https://100DaysToOffload.com.