It allows you to talk to Spotify's recommendations API to specify musical features you'd like recommendations similar to.
It's loads of fun to mess around with, and I've given it an overhaul to include many more dimensions ito. musical features, as well as the ability to log in with Spotify, and save things you find to a playlist. You don't need a subscription to Spotify to use the app either.
Thanks to @Mockapapella for the tagline when I posted the first version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35907215
I really wish streaming services would just let us give conscious direction instead of trying to hack our brains. They're not as good at as they think.
I also began using Tidal and I'm unsure if that's going to be a long-term thing for me. It's good so far but I find I'm not using it as much; I think it will take effort to get my library into its algorithm before it becomes really useful.
One problem with Spotify is it has a very poor memory. It would only focus on things I had recently listened to and almost never accounted for my full library of "liked" songs/albums when giving suggestions (so something like Pink Floyd, despite having many liked songs, would absolutely never appear on a generated playlist). I remember Pandora was even worse at this; I don't know why. Anyway it's too soon yet to tell if Tidal will do the same, but I don't have high hopes. Even YT tends to do this. It's extremely frustrating.
> Your email > The type of Spotify subscription you have, your account country and your settings for explicit content filtering > Your name and username, your profile picture, how many followers you have on Spotify and your public playlists
> Take actions in Spotify on your behalf > Create, edit, and follow private playlists > Create, edit, and follow playlists
I'd be more than happy to share what each of those datapoints is used for (and, in some cases where I only need an auth scope for one permission, but they're grouped together). Selecta is strictly open-source and anonymous analytics.
You can find the auth scopes I use in this file: https://github.com/knightspore/selecta/blob/main/src/app/api...
and the related access they provide here: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/concepts...
If Spotify won't give me those toys, are such things possible via the API that Spotify has provided?
Keep in mind that the actual accuracy of those metrics is debatable. They are cool... But mostly for funzies, or for approximate sorting in 3rd party tools.
1) It would be nice if the button to play a sample of the song was located on each song or somewhere close to it, so that you wouldn't have to move your mouse to the bottom
2) The volume slider isn't super obvious as to its function, I originally thought it was a seek bar. Maybe a Volume icon would help here
3) Most importantly, it would be great if the app could play full tracks for users with Spotify Premium, preferably automatically as well, so that this could be useful as a "radio". One feature I really want is to have a "tunable recommendation radio" of songs that all sound a certain way and this comes very close.
