I love music and I love lists. As Last.fm is some kind of intersection between these two passions, I keep my account updated with almost every digital music I've been listening to since 2006. Yup, 13 years.
Every December, I like to make a playlist with the top tracks I've listened to during the year. Spotify already does something similar, but it's not that right and I know it because of Last.fm data. Besides that, it's very fun to do your own mixtapes, right?
This crawler does exactly this. It takes a year, scrape Last.fm tables to retrieve its top tracks and creates a Spotify playlist. To make things funnier, I have some personal rules to sort the songs and choose the ones that will end up in the playlist:
- Tracks discovered that year shall be prioritized
- The playlist must contain only one track per artist, but the artists that appear more than once score extra points
- To create a sense of timeline, the songs must be sorted by "discovery" date
As track searching and playlist creation require Spotify authentication, you'll have to create a Spotify application too.
It's simple:
scrapy crawl toptracks -a lastfm_username=FOO -a spotify_username=FOO -a spotify_client_id=FOO -a spotify_client_secret=FOO
Don't forget to replace all the FOOs by valid information. The parameter names
are pretty straightforward and you won't have any difficulty filling them.
By default, the crawler searches for last year tracks and limit playlist to 30
tracks. To change that, use year and playlist_length params:
scrapy crawl toptracks ... -a year=2015 -playlist_length=50