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People that follow me closely on social media know that I like playlists a lot. Especially big playlists. I like to put them on shuffle and play them in the background for hours on end, when I’m relaxing, or when I’m at work when I need to focus and need to drain out the noise from my co-workers.

I follow a lot of ambient and instrumental playlists, and I have been building a couple of big playlists myself too, like my Ambient Encounters playlist, my Office Vitamins and my Calm Down and Sleep playlist.

What I also like to listen to are the radio stations you can create for an artist, a track, or even a complete playlist. In case you don’t know how to activate a radio station: click on the three-dot menu button on an artist or playlist page, or click on the three-dot menu that appears for a song when you hover over it, and select the “Go to radio” option. Spotify will generate a playlist for you with tracks that are similar to the artist, playlist or track that you selected, based on statistics and algorithms.

After listening to hundreds of playlists on shuffle and Spotify’s radio stations for years, I have come to the conclusion that Spotify’s shuffle algorithm seems to favor certain artists more than others, and as a result plays tracks from these artists more often than from the other artists. I don’t know why this is, but what I *do* know, is that it often bothers me. I know that I have over 500 different, unique artists at least on my ambient playlists, and I am pretty sure that I haven’t heard a lot of these artists lately when I look over the tracks on my playlists.

Enter the Smarter Playlists web app on the PlaylistMachinery website.

The about page of the Smarter Playlists web app gives an excellent description of what this app does:

” Smarter Playlists is a web app that lets you build complex programs by assembling simple components.

With Smarter Playlists you can create new playlists by combining a wide range of music sources – artists, albums, genres, pre-programmed playlists and filtering and manipulating them with a nifty graph-based UI. “

This web app is very powerful. You can create your own programs with the few dozen building blocks that are available to you with which you can compile your playlists, like picking tracks from playlists, shuffling them around, make selection by date, and a lot more.

The results of my experiments can now be heard on my Daily Ambient Mix playlist on Spotify.
This playlist features 100 beat-less ambient soundscapes and drone tracks from 100 different artists.  It is refreshed every day. And the neat thing is that after every refresh the playlist will have 100 *different* artists than the previous day for maximum variation. The music is great music for relaxing, meditation, sleeping, study and focus work.

The tracks for the Daily Ambient Mix playlist are a number of ambient playlists that I maintain. Some of which are public, and some of which are private. These playlists contain all my favorite ambient tracks and albums that I have collected of the past few years on Spotify. As time progresses these playlists will get bigger and bigger. As a result, the Daily Ambient Mix playlist will get more and more varied. It will become a great collection of new and old ambient tracks, that will be made fresh for you and me every single day.

So that’s the whole story behind the Daily Ambient Mix playlist. I hope you will like it as much as I do. If you do, then make sure to click the little heart button to give the playlist a follow so you can enjoy the playlist whenever you feel the need.