So I just caved into starting a 3 month free trial of Spotify. What have I got to lose? It’s going to make syncing to my android device much easier, plus I can listen to any song I want wherever I am (provided Optus is decent).

Upon starting my Spotify experience, I needed to import my iTunes playlists. I needed to get all of my playlists out of iTunes. I have a LOT of playlists (Over 300). See the image to the left for example. That’s only just a minority of them (I’ve included the scroll bar for reference). Now, getting these outside of iTunes is a process on it’s own, and getting them into Spotify is even more difficult. This would be somewhat easier I suppose if Spotify’s “iTunes Import” feature wasn’t greyed out.

So the next best thing was to use the iTunes playlist export functionality. This can be done by right clicking a playlist and choosing “Export”. Tedious – yes. I only exported about 15 playlists before researching the next step – converting these playlists to a format Spotify can handle. Fortunately there are online tools to do this – however they’re slow, and can only do one playlist at a time. So this was clearly not an option.

I ended up settling for dragging and dropping playlists into Spotify. The flow was as follows:

  1. Create a new Spotify Playlist
  2. Drag Songs From iTunes into Spotify.
  3. Ensure you didn’t duplicate anything

Tedious, especially for 300 playlists. I’m not even sure if I can be bothered to export my entire library to a service I may not use forever. Anyway, we will see where I go with Spotify, and maybe I’ll end up building the tool that I previously wrote about here.