Getting started

This page takes you from the sign-in button to your first smart playlist playing in Spotify.

Sign in with Spotify

Open playlistation.app. There is no account to create: the app sends you straight to Spotify's sign-in page. Any Spotify account works, free or Premium.

Once you are signed in to Spotify, it shows a consent screen listing what Playlistation is asking for. This screen appears on every sign-in, not only the first one, so you always see what the app can do before it does it.

Spotify asks for six permissions: to read your Liked Songs, to see your profile and email, to read your private playlists, and to create and update playlists. Playlistation only writes to the playlists it created, and it never sees your password: Spotify hands the app a token, and that token is what talks to Spotify. To take the access away later, remove Playlistation from the apps list in your Spotify account settings. Each permission and why it is needed is in Security and privacy.

After you accept, Spotify sends you back to the app and you are signed in.

The first read of your library

Right after sign-in, Playlistation reads your Liked Songs for the first time, from the most recently liked, up to your plan's monitoring limit: 1,000 tracks on the Free plan, 3,000 on Plus, 50,000 on Pro. Older tracks are not seen, and the app says so on the Playlists page when that happens. See How syncing works.

This first read feeds the playlist suggestions below. While it runs, the Discover page shows a placeholder card with a spinner, and suggestions appear on their own as they are computed.

Pick your starter playlists on Discover

New accounts land on the Discover page. It lists smart playlists built from your own library: your most-liked artists, artists who appear together on your tracks, your strongest genres, your most represented decades, and recent periods such as "Likes of the week". Each suggestion shows how many of your liked tracks it holds right now.

Click the ones you want, then Create 3 playlists (the number follows your selection). You cannot select more than your plan has room for: the Free plan allows 5 playlists in total. If you would rather build your own, click Skip. You can come back to Discover at any time. How suggestions are computed, how long a batch lasts and what happens to the ones you used is in Quick playlists.

Create a playlist by hand

On the Playlists page, click Create playlist (Create your first playlist when you have none yet). Give it a name. Under Pick your first filter, every filter type is a tile: click one and its settings open in a dialog. Set its value, click Save changes, and add more with Add another filter if you want. Under the list, a sentence spells out what the playlist will gather. Then click Create playlist: the playlist page opens, and its track list shows which of your liked tracks match and, for each one, which filters it passes and which it fails. A playlist needs a name and at least one filter.

The full walkthrough of the form is in Creating a playlist; how to write filters that work together is in Combining filters.

What happens right after you create it

Playlistation creates the playlist on Spotify and queues its first sync; the page updates on its own and the tracks appear without a refresh. The first sync usually takes moments; a large library or a busy queue can make it longer, because everything goes through Spotify's rate-limited API. What the page shows in the meantime is in Creating a playlist.

Find it in Spotify

The playlist is in your Spotify library like any other. From the app, open the playlist's action menu and choose "Open in Spotify", or use the "PLAY ON SPOTIFY" button at the top of the playlist page; "Copy Spotify link" gives you the URL to share. Spotify builds the cover mosaic from the first tracks a little after the first sync, and Playlistation picks it up on its next update.

From here, keep liking tracks in Spotify. Playlistation checks your Liked Songs on your plan's schedule and adds each new like to the playlists it matches. That schedule, and everything else about the updates, is in How syncing works.