Creating a playlist

A smart playlist is a name plus a set of filters. Playlistation runs the filters over your Liked Songs, writes the matching tracks to a playlist on your Spotify account, and keeps doing so as your likes change.

Start from the Playlists page

Open Playlists in the sidebar (the bottom bar on a phone). With no playlist yet, the page shows Create your first playlist; once you have some, Create playlist sits next to the search bar. The button disappears when every slot of your plan is used: 5 playlists on the Free plan, 50 on Plus, 500 on Pro (see Plans and billing).

Name it and add a filter

The create page asks for two things.

1. Playlist name. Used as is on Spotify. You can rename the playlist later.
2. Filters. Under Pick your first filter, every filter type is shown as a tile. Click one and its settings open in a dialog. After the first filter, the list shows it and an Add another filter button, which opens the same dialog on the tiles.

Create playlist stays grayed out until both are there. There is no description field: the playlist gets the Playlistation description when it is created.

Tiles marked with a star need the Plus or Pro plan; the Language tile carries an "Experimental" flask because the detected language can be wrong.

The filter dialog

The dialog is titled Add a new filter and has three parts:

• Filter type. A search box listing all 18 types. Changing the type resets the operator and the value to that type's defaults.
• Operator. Cards, when the type has more than one: Is one of / Is not one of for genres and languages, At least / At most for duration and artist followers. The choices per filter are in the comparison table.
• Value. A list, a slider or date pickers, depending on the type. Each filter page describes its own control.

Save changes is disabled while the filter cannot match anything: nothing selected in an artist, genre or language filter, or a duration of 0:00. Clicking outside the dialog does not close it; use the close button or Escape to discard.

Each saved filter appears as a sentence, for example The track artist is one of Daft Punk, with a plain-language line under it. Hover a row to Edit this filter or Delete this filter.

How many filters

The Free plan evaluates 3 filters per playlist, Plus 30, Pro 100; at the limit, Add another filter is disabled, and what happens past it is in Combining filters.

What happens when you click Create playlist

Playlistation creates a private playlist on your Spotify account right away, with the name you chose and the description "Created using playlistation.com" (with a rocket emoji on each side). It then queues the first sync and opens the playlist page.

Until that first run finishes, the sync pill in the header reads Waiting for first sync, then First sync…, and the track count reads Tracks not counted yet (in the Playlists grid, the card shows a dash). In place of the track list, a panel reads Waiting for the first sync, then Building your playlist. The tracks appear on their own; there is no need to refresh. How syncing works covers what happens after that.

The playlist page

The page has three cards.

Header. The cover, the name, the description, the track count, when the filters were last edited, and the sync pill (Auto-updating once the first sync is done). PLAY ON SPOTIFY opens the playlist in Spotify; Copy Spotify link and Delete sit at the top right. Deleting asks whether the playlist should stay on Spotify (Remove from Playlistation) or go too (Delete everywhere); see Deleting a playlist.

• Renaming. Click the name and type. The change is saved once you stop typing and pushed to Spotify.
• Description. Editable on the Plus and Pro plans. On the Free plan the field is grayed out with the note "A custom description is a paid feature", and the playlist keeps the Playlistation description.

A warning appears here when more than 10,000 tracks match, because Spotify stops adding tracks at that point; the most recently liked ones are kept.

Filters. The same list and dialog as the create page. There is no save button: every change is saved immediately and starts a new sync.

Tracks. Every liked track Playlistation looked at, with a search box, the tabs My library, Included and Excluded (each with a count), and a List / Matrix switch.

Why is this track in, or out

In the List view each row ends with a green check or a red cross. Click it to expand: one line per filter, the filter sentence on the left and what the track scored on the right, such as The track language is French (with a flag to Report an incorrect language), The Energy score is 72%, or Released on June 12, 1998.

A track is Excluded when at least one filter (or one OR group) fails, so the Excluded tab is the fastest way to find out why a song you expected is missing. If nothing matches, loosen a filter and the playlist updates itself.

The Matrix view shows the same thing as a table: tracks in rows, filters in columns, the In / Out decision last.

The Playlists grid

Each card shows the cover, the name, the description, the number of tracks and filters, and the last sync. A dimmed card with an orange "not updating" icon (a circle with a slash) next to the name means the playlist is not being updated: over the plan quota, or parked in error until you edit it (see Troubleshooting). The toolbar has a search box, a Grid view / List view toggle, and Sort by (Name, Number of filters, Number of tracks, Last modified at), which also orders the Your playlists list in the sidebar.