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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Even the fact that all these music services center around playlists is part of the problem. I don't want to spend my life making music playlists - I just want to play music. I don't always want to play an entire album either. What I'm saying is - if I've "added to my library" or I've "loved" a bunch of stuff, it would be so great if there were a convenient way for these services to auto-build playlists or just let me shuffle my whole library.

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Spotify does that. It suggests custom playlists (e.g. Discover Weekly) based on music you listen to. If you play one of your playlists, it will continue playing similar songs even after you run out.

Not the same - yes I want that too, but I want something that auto-curates my music by genre / artist / whatever. My key point here being, I want the option to curate, but I don't want to be forced to curate.

You're not forced to. You get a bunch of different tools in any platform with different degrees of curation. In spotify the most automated ones are Discover Weekly, radios for any track/artist, and daily mixes. You also get playlists made by other people (sometimes hard to find), but the browse section is never curated for you, it just has fixed playlists there. I have discovered orders of magnitude more music since streaming hit the scene.

And I'm fairly sure spotify's competitors also give you the same kind of options with different degrees of curation (if that is a word).

If what you are asking for is "I want a magic DJ that solves all of my listening habits" then I think no app will do that.

I'm finding that the Daily Mixes, found near the Discover Weekly playlist in the "Made for <user>" part of the app, do a good job of this, and will also include similar music not in your library for discovery

In fact, my personal experience is that Daily Mixes do a better job showing me new music than Discover Weekly does

> I want something that auto-curates my music by genre / artist / whatever.

Spotify does do that...

Apple Music has a Recently Added section - not sure if that helps.

> just let me shuffle my whole library.

This is the primary way I use Spotify, is that functionality not working for you?

On iOS: Your Library -> Liked Songs > Shuffle Play

Spotify only lets you save so many song as Liked Songs. Beyond that, you have to put things into separate playlists.

Seems that limit was quite high at 10K songs, and also removed as of May: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270409/spotify-song-lib...

My most popular public playlist with the most subscribers is an old Advent/Christmas/Epiphany playlist that is approaching 10k songs, but it's only classical with some traditional folk music to spice things up a bit. Every December for the past too-many-to-remember years, I've added new music to this list. I'd hate to lose it at this point and I wish I could export it. But there is no doubt Spotify has revolutionized the way I listen to and discover music. I'm actually happy to pay for Spotify Premium because it means I don't have to download anything or keep the physical artifacts of music (vinyl) I used to need to make room for and worry about damaging when I moved, as well as all the stereo equipment, replacing tubes and needles, etc.

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