Track Down: A Playlist Tool With No Backend to Maintain
Track Down converts music from wherever it actually lives — a YouTube playlist, a Last.fm profile, a subreddit, a dumped text file — into a real Spotify playlist. It's live at trackdown.yyyokel.com, along with a small toolbox for playlist covers, now-playing cards, and stats cards.
Why Bother
Playlist migration is a permanent, unglamorous need. People switch services, lose a library, or end up with music scattered across platforms that don't talk to each other. Nobody's chasing a trend by fixing that; it's just been broken the whole time. The bet was that a tool for it could run on almost nothing: no database, no server-side sessions, nothing that needs checking on at 2am.
What Got Built
Eleven ways in: YouTube, Last.fm (five different views — tags, similar artists, loved tracks, top tracks, artist top tracks), file uploads, subreddit scans, Reddit thread scans, and Spotify-to-Spotify. Whatever the source, the same matching engine takes a messy artist/track guess and finds the right Spotify match, grouping results into "confident" and "needs a second look" so nothing gets added silently wrong.
The toolbox is the fun half: canvas-rendered playlist covers, now-playing cards, and stats cards that render and download straight in the browser — no server round-trip, no account required to use them.
It's a real utility, not a content wrapper. If it works, it keeps getting used quietly. If it doesn't, it cost basically nothing to find out. Almost everything runs on the user's own Spotify credentials in their own browser. Two tiny passthrough routes hiding two API keys are the entire server footprint. About as close to "ship it and forget it" as a real product gets.
Live and functional against the full feature list, no usage data yet. Too new to know if the toolbox images actually get shared anywhere, or if this turns into a habit for anyone. Worth watching, not calling.
The actual origin story — why this specific tool, why now — is its own post: I Used Spotlistr Every Week. Then Playlist Creation Started Costing Credits.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Track Down?
- A tool that converts music from sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Reddit, and file uploads into a real Spotify playlist, plus a small toolbox of shareable music images (covers, now-playing cards, stats cards). It's hosted at trackdown.yyyokel.com.
- Who is Track Down actually for?
- Anyone who's accumulated music somewhere Spotify can't reach directly — a YouTube playlist, a Last.fm scrobble history, a subreddit's recommendations, a dumped text file of song names — and wants it as a real playlist without manually rebuilding it track by track.
- Why does it matter that Track Down has no database?
- It means the tool costs almost nothing to keep running and has almost nothing that can break server-side. Auth, search, matching, and image rendering all happen in the user's own browser using their own Spotify token. That's the difference between a tool you can leave alone and one you have to maintain forever.