MP3 to Streaming — from playlists to tracklists (DJ wannabe)

Tools to enhance your musical experience

3 min readApr 27, 2020

I remember the first time I heard about MP3, a cousin’s friend showed me that was possible to have music on the computer. No more CDs, we could listen to songs straight away and in any order. We just needed an MP3 player. I am not saying the portables, but the software to reproduce it. Like the Winamp.

(I can’t remember how many hours I spent in this equalizer and skins’ options)

At that time (early 2000s), it was all about saving the favorites songs in one giant library. Then we had Napster and all sorts of peer-to-peer options. The portable MP3 players arose and my last purchase was the iPod classic with its huge 160GB, space enough to keep all my songs. Meanwhile, I started to create many playlists.

(This little thing followed me everywhere, as a portable party and driving companion)

With the smartphones and bigger storage, the transitions from the players to cellphones started until the popularization of the streaming services. That was when I finally decided to delete all my MP3s and rely 100% upon Spotify. I imported all my playlists to this service, even though some songs didn’t exist there. Not a major issue considering all the new easiness of playing and accessing my songs everywhere.

Tracklisting

I build not only playlists according to a specific mood, but I also give special attention to the transitions between songs. They must be smooth and in the right order. The easiest way is to set the player to some fade in/fade out and remove any silence between songs. It is pretty simple but helps with the playlist’s cadence. The best simple app that I found to do this and a bit more is Pyro (iOS only).

Pyro uses its own technology to automatically adjust the transitions. You can also reorganize the order of the songs according to their tempo. Many times I felt that even with good transitions the order of the songs wasn’t the best one. To have a more consistent flow, I started using Skiley, a web tool that helps organize your Spotify playlists by many attributes. I suggest the order by “Energy”, which creates a sense of ascending mood even across different music genres.

(Skiley is the last touch to organize my tracklists)

With a specific order made by you or with the help of software, simple playlists become a tracklist. This is the closest I could get with automatized tools to recreate the feeling of a DJ set.

Spotify, Pyro, and Skiley are my killer combo for good tracklists. Of course, it doesn’t get any close to musical professional tools or the quality of DJs performances, but it makes me happy with the result.

Below, I share some of my tracklists and videos of great DJs’ performances. I hope you enjoy it. By the way, I am always curious to check other’s people selections. :)