The other day I was driving in the Tesla and clicked and Spotify application and chose a playlist. In this case, it was the “This is Stevie Wonder” playlist, which my wife and I had listened to the night before. I got a “load error” on a song.
I tried another and got the same thing. I tried a third in this playlist, thinking this was some network error, but nothing worked. I switched to a different playlist and got a song to play, but when I went back to the Stevie Wonder one, it showed all the songs, but wouldn’t play.
I finally connected my phone and opened the playlist in Spotify only to see it was empty. Somehow the Spotify generated list was deleted and the app in the Tesla didn’t update to see the issue.
That got me thinking. I don’t have a lot of playlists, but I do sometimes follow and set up system playlists that I like. In the modern world where I’m sharing this data with others, I’m dependent that someone else doesn’t break things.
I looked around to see if I could export and import playlists, or copy them, but I didn’t see anything, so I decided to make my own backup. There are really only 5 or 6 of these I follow, so I created my own new playlist.
I renamed it to the band name, in this case, The Beatles. Next, I opened the Spotify list, selected the songs, and then dragged them over.
I did this for the 5 or 6 “This is xxx” lists and then removed those Spotify ones from my list. If those get updated, I won’t know, but that’s not critical here. If I find something missing, or want to add something, I can. In fact, my “John Mayer” list now has “83”, which was missing from the Spotify list.
Another case where a quick manual task works well and likely is better than a lot of code work. Here, that would probably be a lot of research to find something that might not even exist.