Edited 1/7/2020 to reflect that the new workbook can open your 8tracks folder and fix errored playlists you’ve already run with just a few clicks, which I hadn’t realized until I had time to use it myself!
The following is the new, up-to-date as of 1/6/2020 version of this reblog chain with extraneous and out-of-date information removed and a link to and information on the new workbook.
After 8tracks announced, with only a few days’ notice, that it was shutting down on 12/31/2019, an effort was made to preserve as many playlists as possible. The original 8tracks backup macro by VidderAdmin was downloaded over a hundred times across multiple continents, and the information from thousands of playlists was saved. Go fandom!
However, it turns out that 8tracks is staying up a bit longer—though we have no way of knowing how long—which leaves more time to save playlist information. To this end, VidderAdmin and the team that formed to work on this created a new macro workbook that fixes some issues and improves functionality.
The Updated Macro Workbook
- FIXED: playlists with Unicode producing 0kb files (and helps rerun files that failed)
- FIXED: missing images (and helps rerun files that failed)
- IMPROVED FUNCTIONALITY: helps rerun failures, allows user to choose folders to download to and to download to subfolders by fandom tag specified by user, accounts for extraneous text at the end of URLs without the user needing to ctrl+f and delete it, checks folders to ensure every text file has a matching image and reruns those without
You will need to have macros enabled to run the spreadsheet; here’s how to enable macros. Side note: genuinely friendly PSA that macros are default-disabled in Excel for a reason. Macro viruses can send and delete files and be computer-destroying levels of dangerous; always be careful what you choose to download and run!
[Rest of ID in alt text] “8tracksbackup is a macro-enabled workbook that helps to quickly download playlist metadata (including the track list) and cover artwork based on URLs that you provide. We have also included some tools to help ensure those downloads worked correctly.
We’re a team of volunteers hoping to preserve fandom history before it’s lost, but we are not affiliated with 8tracks, and we are not affiliated with Internet Archive.
While we’ve done our best to test out the macros in this workbook and address any bugs or glitches, unfortunately we can’t guarantee how it will perform, and you are using this at your own risk.
If you’re familiar with VBA, you can take a look at the code yourself, but again please know that we can’t guarantee how it will perform if you modify the code, or if you are sent a copy of this workbook that didn’t come from us.
We’ve included some instructions within these tabs, but if you have further questions, please contact us at 8tracksbackup AT gmail DOT com and we’ll do what we can to help.
If you are interested in submitting your 8tracks metadata and covers to the Internet Archive to be included in an 8tracks Fandom History Collection, please contact us at the email above by 12/31/2020.
If you’d like us to notify you when we’ve updated the workbook, or if you do not want your playlists included in our collection, you can fill out this Google Form: forms.gle/9Weh4RpKYnXFTrMQ6
Thank you for helping to save at-risk fanworks!”
So, do you need to re-run URLs you’ve already saved?
One of the main (and hardest to spot) issues in the original pre-New-Years macro was that JSON files (where the tracklists are) were coming out blank for playlists whose information included Unicode (pretty much anything not in the Roman alphabet; for example, Japanese lettering and Chinese characters).
EDITING TO ADD: I wrote the below struckthrough text before I’d used the new macro workbook, and I hadn’t yet realized that it has a sheet that quickly finds and re-runs the errored playlists in your 8tracks folder (and/or whichever other folders you point it at, if you’ve organized playlist files into multiple folders). It took me less than an hour to use it to fix all the errored playlists out of the over 6,000 total playlists I’d already run! So, my errored playlists from running the first macro are fixed, and if you have errored playlists from running the first macro, it should take just a few clicks and less than an hour’s running time to fix them. :)
So if you want to make sure that closer to all of the playlist URLs you ran through the macro have their tracklists saved, especially for tags/fandoms with many playlists with Unicode (for example, anime fandoms), you may want to re-run them with the new macro (which also has some convenient ways of finding the errored playlists).
However, don’t despair if you won’t have time to re-run URLs; having already saved a majority is much better than nothing having been saved! (If you don’t have time, you can also share your URLs with us at the email above in case someone has time to run them on the new macro, though please know that we may not have time to get to them. Please include a note that they were already run with a previous version—thanks!)
A note for folks who sent me, starfleetdoesntfirefirst, URLs to run: As I mentioned in another post, back in the days of the first macro I was able to get to some or all of what each person sent, but may not have time to get to all of what each person sent depending on when 8tracks shuts down. However, I almost definitely won’t have time to use the new macro to re-run Unicode-containing and other errored playlists I already ran. I’ll pass them along to the rest of this team, but given that none of us can guarantee we’ll get to them before 8tracks shuts down, if you feel strongly about making sure everything you sent to me gets re-run with the new macro, it may be worth pinging your Excel-having friends for aid. (I apologize for this; I didn’t anticipate things getting to this stage rather than a quick pre-New-Years effort!)
How to record & check (some of) which 8tracks tags have already had their playlists extracted
This Dreamwidth post is a place where you can comment to record which 8tracks tags, from any fandom (or nonfandom topic like “autumn”), you have extracted the URLs from, and check which 8tracks tags others have already extracted the URLs from, to avoid unnecessarily duplicating work. (You don’t need a Dreamwidth account to comment!) Not everyone who is extracting URLs is going to know about this post, so no guarantees of avoiding duplication, but it’s a start. :)
How to extract playlist URLs for use with the workbook
1) Do a tag search on 8tracks (or go to your own “liked” or “already listened” page if those are the playlists you want to save). Scroll to the very bottom of the page (so that all playlists have loaded and actually appeared on the page).
Note that if your tag has more than 1000 results, 8tracks will still only grab 1000.
2) Use a link-extracter plugin (like this one for Chrome) to extract all the links on the page.
3) Filter for links with the word “play” in them. This will pull up only the actual playlists. (There were 54 playlists tagged “Nyota Uhura,” and as you can see in the screencap, adding the filter “play” gives exactly 54 results.)
4) Copy into spreadsheet.
Note on Archive Team’s effort
Archive Team is also attempting to archive as many playlists as they can, by random number rather than by tag due to 8tracks’s 1000-playlist limit in tag search. These will probably be stored on the Internet Archive as WARC files, which means that it will be harder for non-power-users to access playlist info, thus our continuing this separate effort.
Per@meeedeee: As a result they dropped trying to archive by tags, instead they’re running 3.5 million random numbers in the hopes of grabbing what they can. On the back end of 8tracks, the playlist data is not stored by URL, or by tag, but by unique numeric identifier. Because of the volume that they have to run, the Archive Team will not be archiving the “look and feel” (user profile icons). Only basic metadata (playlist, user name, comments) and cover art. The meta data will be stored in a json format which looks like this and is not easily readable https://8tracks.com/mixes/3169100/tracks_for_international.jsonh
