How to use Playlistation

Playlistation builds smart playlists for Spotify. You set up a playlist with filters, such as "artist is Daft Punk" or "released in the 1990s", and Playlistation fills it from your Liked Songs and keeps it in sync as you like and unlike tracks. The playlists are real Spotify playlists in your own library. You play them in Spotify, on any device, like any other playlist.

How it works

1. Sign in with Spotify. You never type a password into Playlistation. The first time, Spotify shows you what the app may do, read your Liked Songs and manage the playlists it creates, then sends you back. Later sign-ins usually skip that screen. Free and Premium Spotify accounts both work. See Getting started.
2. Create a smart playlist from filters. Add one or more filters; the playlist is named after them. Every filter works on every plan. While you build it, the app shows which of your liked tracks match and why. See Creating a playlist and All filters.
3. Let it run. Playlistation creates the playlist on Spotify and fills it. From then on it re-runs your filters over your Liked Songs on a schedule set by your plan, adding the tracks that now match and removing the ones that no longer do. Like a track in Spotify and it lands in the right playlists on its own. See How syncing works.

If you do not want to start from a blank form, the Discover page suggests playlists built from what you already like, and the Stats page can turn a few artists, genres or decades into a playlist in one action. See One-click playlists.

What Playlistation is not

It is not a recommendation engine. Every track in a smart playlist comes from your Liked Songs. Playlistation never adds a track you have not liked, and it does not read your listening history or what is in your other playlists. The suggestions on the Discover page are built from your own library too: they are groupings of what you already like, not new music.

It is not a manual playlist editor. A smart playlist is the result of its filters. If you add a track to one by hand in Spotify, the next sync removes it, because it does not match, unless it is a local file from your computer, which Spotify does not let apps remove. If you remove a matching track by hand, the next sync puts it back. To change what is in a playlist, change its filters or like and unlike tracks. Setting a cover image in Spotify is fine; a rename made in Spotify is overwritten the next time you edit the playlist in the app, so rename it in the app instead. The details are in How syncing works.

It does not touch playlists it did not create. Playlistation only writes to the playlists you created through it. Your other playlists are never modified. Once a day the app lists them, and only to notice when you have deleted one of its own in Spotify.

Who it is for

Playlistation is for people who like tracks as they go and would rather not sort them by hand. If your Liked Songs list is where everything ends up, and you want a running playlist, a French rap playlist, a "liked this month" playlist and an 80s playlist that all stay current without you touching them, that is the use case.

It is less useful if you curate playlists track by track and want to keep that control (a smart playlist overrides manual edits), or if the music you want to organize is not in your Liked Songs.

Plans

Every plan has every filter. The Free plan covers a small library: the 1,000 most recently liked tracks monitored, 5 playlists, and an update pass once a day. Plus monitors 3,000 tracks and refreshes every hour, Pro monitors your whole library and refreshes in under 30 minutes; both have unlimited playlists and custom playlist descriptions. Pro adds Sync now, the full playlist history and CSV exports. The numbers are compared side by side in Plans and billing.

Where to go next

• Getting started: sign in, the consent screen, your first playlist.
• How syncing works: what is read, how often, playlist statuses, the Spotify limits.
• Installing the app: put it on your iPhone or Android home screen.
• Creating a playlist, Combining filters and One-click playlists.
• All filters, with a comparison table of every filter's operators and default.
• Library stats.
• Library backups: dated copies of your Liked Songs and playlists, with the date you liked each song, to download as CSV or JSON.
• Plans and billing, Settings, Security and privacy, Deleting your account.
• Giving feedback, Requesting a feature and Troubleshooting.
• Organizing your Spotify Liked Songs: one page per way of sorting a library, shorter than the reference.

Common questions