Can you automate iTunes/Music playlist editing?

[porican]

I curate playlists for an agency, and one of the functions is updating the customer-facing playlist (the one that gets published) from a larger private track pool. Every update cycle, i need to make sure that 40% of the songs in the customer-facing playlist are “new” tracks from the track pool, while keeping the 10-15 songs deemed permanent in the customer-facing playlist. In order to make sure I don't have duplicates, every cycle I end up making three working playlists: the *new* playlist (starting with the 10-15 permanent songs), the *old* playlist (from the previous cycle), and a copy of the track pool playlist. I compare the track pool and the *old* playlist, deleting any song in the track pool that appears in the *old* playlist. Then I do the same with the 10-15 permanent songs and the *old* playlist, deleting the permanent songs from the *old* playlist. Then I add tracks from the newly trimmed *old* playlist and track pool to the *new* playlist, and I'm done.

My question: can I automate the action of comparing and deleting tracks between these playlists? I wish automator had a function that would just compare two playlists and delete duplicate tracks from one of them, kinda like the way Gemini works with duplicate files in Finder. Does any app do this? Could I hire a software engineer to write a simple script to do this for me? What would they need to do so?

I'm mostly working on an old Mac Pro running Mojave, so ideally the solution would work in iTunes, but if there is one for Music on Catalina or Ventura that would also work.

Thanks in advance!

 

[kryten2]

Info: Managing Playlists and Compare Two Playlists

 

[arw]

Are you aware of smart playlists? There you never have duplicates and you don’t have to manually manage anything. You just have to set the right rules once.

If you link (smart) playlists, you can easily have a final playlist that:
- includes your permanent 10-15 songs from one playlist
- the rest (up to a fixed track number) gets automatically filled with songs from another playlist/pool
- from these additional filler tracks, you can define that 50% must have been added in the current week, 25% during the last 2 weeks, etc…
- specific tracks from a 'blacklist' playlist can be blocked from appearing in your final playlist (defined by keywords, artist, rating, etc)

You can still save/export it as a 'stupid' playlist or even copy the songs onto an external hard disk/folder.

You can PM me what your exact wishes for the playlist look like and I can give it a try (all directly in iTunes).

 

[porican]

Info: Managing Playlists and Compare Two Playlists

Thank you so much!!! IDK why i didn't think of my man doug, i already use one of his scripts!

 

[porican]

Are you aware of smart playlists? There you never have duplicates and you don’t have to manually manage anything. You just have to set the right rules once.

If you link (smart) playlists, you can easily have a final playlist that:
- includes your permanent 10-15 songs from one playlist
- the rest (up to a fixed track number) gets automatically filled with songs from another playlist/pool
- from these additional filler tracks, you can define that 50% must have been added in the current week, 25% during the last 2 weeks, etc…
- specific tracks from a 'blacklist' playlist can be blocked from appearing in your final playlist (defined by keywords, artist, rating, etc)

You can still save/export it as a 'stupid' playlist or even copy the songs onto an external hard disk/folder.

You can PM me what your exact wishes for the playlist look like and I can give it a try (all directly in iTunes).

I have not been able to get this to work but I'll put something together and PM u!!!