DJALCHEMI

Playlist portability: comparative review

One thing leads to another and, when we saw Barb Jungr play just before Christmas, I got a copy of her Every Grain of Sand album of Bob Dylan covers, which triggered another bout of my recurrent mania for these cover versions. I went through all my old covers albums again, ripped my favourite versions onto iTunes, scrabbled round on the web once again and even ordered a further album (The Bob Dylan Songbook).

I ended up with 81 songs in an iTunes playlist, which fills my iPod Shuffle to just over 80% full. The rest of this posting is the story of what happened when I tried to upload and publish this playlist using three different playlist sharing services.

When I reviewed playlist sharing services before, portability was one of the factors I considered — how can you import and export your playlist to and from the service? However, my reviews of this factor were based on inspection only — not trying it out for real. Using iTunes it takes very little time to create a playlist from tracks in your digital collection, compared with using one of the online services. With iTunes, firstly, all the basic track data (title, artist etc) is already there, courtesy of your music store or Gracenote, so no typing of track names. Secondly, iTunes offers drag-and-drop for organising the sequence of your playlist, and copying multiple tracks at once, whereas few web-based services yet offer this ease of use. So if you can use iTunes (or WinAmp etc), you'd be a fool not to.

The three playlist services I used for this exercise are the only three I'm aware of that allow you to upload playlists from iTunes: FIQL, MusicStrands and GoFish. [Update, 8 August 02006: GoFish has withdrawn its playlist functions. Other services such as Mixlister now allow uploading of playlists.]

The issues I was concerned with were, first and foremost, how quick and easy was it to get my playlist data into the service, then how well would the services recognise the tracks (some of which are reasonably obscure), and how easy would it be for others to hear them. The table below shows what I found.

To summarise, FIQL was probably the easiest and quickest for getting the list of tracks onto the web, but has the poorest results when it comes to recognising the tracks, and is least useful for hearing them. Importing the playlist to GoFish was a pain in the arse, but conversely it offers the best listening experience once the list is established. MusicStrands falls between these poles, with pretty straightforward uploading, good recognition of tracks and moderate listening experience.

Finally, a few words about exporting playlists from these sites. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all of them provide a straightforward way of exporting full playlists, which would make it to easy for you to switch your allegiance to another service provider. However, MusicStrands is the exception to this, providing a 'Download this playlist' button, which provides an XML version of the playlist. I could then upload this XML file to GoFish, and I could import it to iTunes, though in the latter case only a minority of the tracks could be found again (even though they are all in my library), presumably because the metadata had been changed by MusicStrands, as discussed above.

What some of the playlist services provide is the means to include 'badges' for your playlists on your other sites. So here are, first, the FIQL badge for my Dylan playlist, then the GoFish equivalent, and finally a badge for a different playlist from the Plurn playlist site.

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get one at Plurn.com.