It was 2013, a bit more than a decade ago, and I was living and studying in the United Kingdom for a year, through a government program that allowed us to attend foreign universities. I had never left my home country before, thus it was being a transformative experience for me, as I was getting the chance to experience plenty of things I could never find in Brazil¹. One of these turned out to be Spotify².

I don’t even remember whether I was still using Winamp or AIMP as my main audio player software back then³, but what I do recall is that maintaining our song files was a serious chore that I shared with my older brother very zealously ever since we lost our collection due to an unsolicited hard disk wipe from an IT technician⁴. We didn’t just download them and added to some folder, it was a multi-step burden process that looked something like this:

1. Get the songs we wanted from somewhere.
2. Organize these songs into layers of folders: each artist had its own folder and within it additional folders for each album, with the pattern “YYYY - Album Name”.
3. Load the songs onto MP3Gain to normalize the songs volumes by album. Here we were trying to prevent the “TV ad effect”, when you’re watching something at a given volume and when the ad starts it’s usually at a much louder volume.
4. Load the songs onto TagScanner to inspect and fix the metadata of the songs, such as adding the album year, cover image, or their track number.

It was laborious, yet very rewarding when we opened the media player and saw everything tidy both in the music list and in the “currently playing”. Nonetheless, I was looking forward to not wasting time having to do any of these again and Spotify seemed like a great alternative, but it was not yet available in Brazil. Back then I remember that as far as music streaming went we were mostly relying on Grooveshark.

Back to 2013 in the UK, where I created my account on Spotify by logging in with Facebook⁵ and started listening to songs. It was convenient and I was enjoying it, which was great given that a few months later they announced they would be expanding to Brazil, still at that time I was not ready to pay for a music subscription service and since mobile internet was very expensive back home, it would be more convenient to maintain my own files on my phone and computer.

Fast forward a few years and the mobile internet was getting cheaper, phones faster and it was becoming increasingly more complex to maintain the files, as now one could play the songs not only on the computer and the phone, but on the TV, car and many more. Additionally, I often wanted to hear my songs while at work, but I wouldn’t transfer my own files there, so a seamless solution was needed and I started paying for Spotify.

I was never much into the “creating playlists” thing, so all I did was navigating to the artists I wanted and started “liking” their albums so they could show up on my list, as well as their songs.

Ever since we maintained our own songs, we switched between different listening habits: sometimes hearing a full album in order, but on occasion just hitting play on a random song and listening through all of the artists on shuffle. My habits worked similarly on Spotify, until at some point in 2019 when they decided to change the interface so that when you liked an album, it would not automatically and individually add all of its songs to your song list.

Over the years I loathed several changes in the app user interface, but none of those had me so annoyed as this one, and it seems I was not alone. With that change every time I liked a new album, I would have to click to save the album, as well as each song. I did not want to do this, and so my habits changed, over time I stopped listening to all my songs on shuffle, because they were now an incomplete snapshot of everything I had liked.

Skipping to yesterday, 12/26/2024, when I had to drive alone under heavy rain for approximately 40 minutes and I didn’t want to do it in silence. I opened the app and hit play on a single song I liked, leaving Spotify to its magic “radio” feature. During the journey, I listened to some great new songs I didn’t know⁶, but it also played some others I used to like and were forgotten, just because I never remembered to play their specific album.

At that point I understood that the “true music shuffle” was something I longed-for and desperately needed to recover. Surely it would have been solved by now, since it had been 5 years past the change, so I hit google and found a Reddit thread where someone was asking for exactly what I wanted, and where a fellow developer that goes by the username buddamus8 answered exactly what I needed.

It’s a 600-line, not super simple, script, it can be unsafe⁷ and it can violate some clause of Spotify’s end user agreement, but now I had a way to, at the click of a button, add all of the songs of my liked albums back to the “Liked Songs” list. I did it and a whopping 600 songs were added to my list, increasing its size by 20%.

I once more have a way to listen to my music on “true shuffle” mode⁸, thank you buddamus8⁹!