This script looks through a scrobbles.csv from lastfm, or any compatible source, and finds repeating playlists. It may be useful for (re)discovering old playlists from a user's listening history.
Currently it finds a lot of duplicates, but ideally it would present trees of related playlists, with information about when they first appeared and when they diverged.
What you need:
- A csv to import. One possibility is https://lastfm.ghan.nl/export/ (via https://support.last.fm/t/how-can-i-download-backup-my-last-fm-scrobbling-data/171/2)
The script uses the artist, album, song title, and date/time fields to look through the file for 'n = 3' lines that repeat twice or more, not counting them if they are all from the same album. display repeating lines with count of how many times they repeated
Future development ideas
Confounding variables:
- Sometimes the listener listened to a song more than once before moving to the next one. Playlist finder should still find these variants
- The time dimension provides useful context: songs listened to hours later may be a different listening 'session,' and not part of the playlist
- User may have listened to just part of the playlist: a partial listen. Or part of the playlist, then some other songs, and then the second part. The program should find these too, and maybe have a setting to display them or not.
- Sometimes the csv is small (hundreds) sometimes large (tens of thousands) and the script is not yet efficient.
Advanced:
- listening history has traces of when the user first built the playlist, or listened to variants. It would be interesting to display related playlists in a representation that shows their change through time and relationship to each other.
- Possible format for above: a timeline showing a tree, branches, and diffs.