SwipeyTunes: Or how I fell in love with my music all over again.
TLDR; SwipeyTunes helps you clean out your iTunes by swiping left or right. Here’s a link to Download the Mac App (1.1mb). I’d love feedback.
Kierkegaard said Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
It all started out very innocently. All I wanted to do was remove the tracks I don’t listen to on iTunes. So I googled.
And I found great tips for deleting dupes or dead tracks. But that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t give a damn about artwork, metadata or classification. All I want is to delete the thousands of tracks that I always hit ‘skip’ over when I’m playing my music on shuffle. I have about 7000 tracks in my iTunes, I’m pretty sure I listen to only about 10% of it. The remaining 90% is cruft that’s accumulated over a decade.
A side note about myself as a listener:
1. I don’t have any particular allegiance towards any genre
2. Playlists are nice, but I don’t really care about those too
3. 99% of the time, I just hit shuffle and let the music play
4. I like my universe random
Okay, back to cleaning out finding a way to kill those unheard/hated tracks and only keep the sweet, sweet audio gold that I can listen to a thousand times.
I googled for “cleanup itunes apps”. I tried the mac app store too.
The keener reader would be wondering ‘What about Dougs scripts huh?’ right about now. You’d be right. I looked at those and I’ve got two problems with those scripts. First though, I love the fact that they’re installable and accessible and supremely useful to everybody and there are scripts to do practically everything you can think of… except the one thing I want to do, Which is help me choose the music I want, and delete the music I don’t want. Second, scripts just feel… ugly.
While searching for this app I had a very clear idea of what I wanted, I was basically looking for something that let me swoosh through tracks pretty fast a hit delete when I heard something I didn’t like.
Sounds a helluva lot like Tinder doesn’t it? There’s something about a swipe left or right interface that’s so versatile and universal. It’s instantly understandable and is totally repeatable while not being annoying.
There are some weird iPhone apps that mashup Tinder with music, but I think that’s another thing entirely.
V1 of SwipeyTunes
Although that screenshot looks rather bare. It was hard work getting all those elements in place. It’s remarkable how much extra effort and programming goes into making as few things as possible.
Errata points while building v1
- Turns out iTunes doesn’t use the old XML format anymore, it uses a new iTunes framework which is annoyingly read-only. Kinda makes sense considering the whole Apple music & iCloud integration bit. I still have no idea what Apple Music & iCloud are supposed to do for my life.
- Which means that while we can delete tracks, we can’t take them out of the iTunes playlist. I’ve put instructions in SwipeyTunes on how to do that manually, but its hacky and annoying.
- Getting that oscilloscope to work was hard until i stumbled across EZAudio. Epic Library.
- The little smiley faces do a nice job of explaining the concept.
- Keyboard shortcuts were definitely required
- Undo was definitely required too
- And it seemed like it would be great way to discover music too
V2 of SwipeyTunes
So much nicer…
I’ve gotten through a half my music library now and had a great time doing so. Using SwipeyTunes somehow is like a journey through time and space, you remember things and people while you’re sorting out your tracks, its quite cool.
There are still a bunch of things that could be done better, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with this little app.
Please considering giving it a whirl, Here’s a link to download the mac app (1.1mb). I’d love feedback.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.