Rotulo is a web-based custom interface to listen to Spotify in a different way. Being frustrated with the uipdates Spotify is rolling out, I started designing, developing and deploying a system based on tags instead of playlists.
As I felt limited by the fact that Spotify uses playlists I sketched out a new system, working up from a few functions I values (e.g. smart search).
‘Rotulo’ uses tags instead of playlists, it shows all the songs you have saved and what tags they have. In reality they are handled the same in the back-end, but visually, it makes more sense to have the tags ehind each song, instead of having a song in multiple playlists.
The next feature is smart filtering and searching, the searchbox at the top allows you to include and exclude certain keywords, for example including songs that have multiple tags but exluding the ones that have another tag. It also allows to filter for artist names.
Furthermore, I made the process of adding, creating and removing tags on a song, as efficient as possible, since that is what annoyed me the most about the existing app. The possibility to save smart filters was added so that they dynamically update once you add new songs.
Implementation
Using the Spotify API and applying some transformations allowed my to fetch all the songs a used had saved, including the playlists that song is in. After populating the interface with all the tracks the filtering functions allowed you to select a few songs, which could then be send to Spotify in another API call to play the songs, this meant the app was just as smooth to use as the actual interface, even allowing skipping of songs and exporting selections to a newplaylist.
Not-working-because-of-API-changes demo:
https://spotifyinterface.onrender.com
If you have any interest in getting it working again or have any questions about how it was implemented, feel free to contact me!