I’ve realized that there are actually quite a few people who’d like to listen to my show — or even listen to it again — that really want my podcast back.
So I’ve gotten back into the (very long) backlog of episodes.
One problem I’ve found is that Music.app has, at least a few times, lost its little mind and I’ve had to rebuild my libraries from scratch. This means that I’ve both lost some tracks (breaking the historical record that I was using my saved playlists for) and lost some playlists altogether.
I decided that the easiest thing to do was try to automate this as much as possible. Since I’m an Apple developer, that $99 a year pays for access to ShazamKit, which means I can write a command-line Swift program to feed a podcast and have it (try, at least) to recognize the tracks and reconstruct the playlist.
Experimenting with the RadioSpiral library, it’s pretty good at recognizing moderately popular artists like Palancar or Robert Scott Thompson, but stumbles on more esoteric picks like Una Voce.
I’ll give it a try across my episodes and see how well it will work.
And I’m definitely going to find a safer backup for my playlists.