Running with spotify

I run occasionally. I started running a few years back. When I started, I could not run for more than half a kilometer. Seriously! Excessive panting, chest pain, people staring at me.The works. Anyhu, I am much better at it now, and music has played a very important role in improving my running. Initially it was just random playlists. After a while i realized that i was running better when a few specific songs where playing on the phone. Joker and the thief, I Don't need no doctor by John Mayer, Rockafeller skank to name a few.

After a few searches back home, i realized song tempos(BPM) and running was a big thing. There was jog.fm . There was a lifehacker article about it. I took some time to go through my music collection, used jog.fm to find out the songs with ideal tempos and created new playlists. My distance and pace improved .

Once i started using spotify, I always wished i could get the songs of a particular tempo directly to spotify ( without manually searching and adding them, once i got a good song from jog.fm ). I found out this sample website of echonest which created better playlists based on artists, songs, danceability, energy and tempo. I had to find a way to get the playlist from the site and save it in spotify. I poked around with spotify desktop apps, and the echonest website, and put up a spotify app called pacemaker.

The major chunk of work is done by the echonest website. I pulled the code from the website and put it into the app. My only addition was to implement a "Save playlist to spotify" feature.

Heres how i use this app for running.

1. Think of a few artists i like to listen to while i run.
2. Fire up spotify on my desktop, type in my artists on the pacemaker app. Add the tempo constraint and click "Go".
3. I like to walk(warm up) at a BPM of 110-130. So i create a playlist for that tempo range.
4. My slow running pace is around 140-160 bpm. I create a playlist for that.
5. My fast running pace is around 160-180. I create a playlist for that too.
6. With this app, i have actually created many playlists, based on many artists, for each tempo range.
7. Before a run, i just go through the playlists, and drag a few songs from each, into a new playlist so that i have a single playlist with each tempo
8. And now that i have spotify on my phone, the playlists can be accessed on the phone.
9. I go running :)

The code is up on github at Pacemaker . You can find more details on installation and usage inside the repo. Have fun :)

Here is my spotify profile.