playlist-killer

A hacky Golang program to clean up my Spotify playlists. WARNING - This program can and will delete all your playlists. Use caution!

Problem

I have been using Spotify for well over a decade, including many years before they provided the ability to save albums and follow artists separately, rather than having to create a playlist for each. As a result, I have a long list of "album" playlists that I want rid of. Instead of right-clicking each individually, it gave a good opportunity to check out the Spotify API and practice some Go.

Runing the Application

Prerequisites:

Golang
A Spotify account

Running Playlist Killer:

Go to the Spotify API reference
Click "Get Token"
Select playlist-read-private and playlist-modify-private, click "Request Token", then copy it for later
Build the program with go build .
Run ./playlist-killer <YOUR TOKEN HERE>

Using Playlist Killer:

The program will use the user token to fetch all playlists and write them to a file.
It will then open the file using the user's default editor (i.e. $EDITOR).
The user will see a CSV containing the playlist's title and uuid. Delete the rows you wish to keep and when ready, save the file and quit the editor.
The program will then print the total number of playlists to delete and will ask for confirmation. This is your last opportunity to abort.
The playlists will then be deleted.

Next Steps

If I was really motivated, I would include the auth part in the program itself, rather than having to manually generate your own token. I'm not though. It will be a starting point if I want to do more with the Spotify API in the future though.