As we get down to the wire, it’s become a mad dash to save as much Yahoo content as possible. Without OTW’s (Organization for Transformative Work) help the archive wouldn’t be able to archive a FRACTION of the content that it’s going to archive. We’ve currently stored 400+ Sites and we’re looking to preserve Yahoo’s Sim groups as well.
During this time fandoms have banded together to gather as much fanwork as possible (including sims content) as well as fanfiction, fanart, and various fan work in communities for television shows, movies, bands, and other games.
If you have a moment or if you can reblog this to signal boost please do. The only way that we can retrieve, organize, and store such a large amount of data is by volunteer contribution. The only way that Sim Archive will be able to store this content is if you can help OTW’s Yahoo Group’s committee do its job!
You can follow along with the process on this Tumblr.
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The following is the new, up-to-date as of 1/6/2020 version of this reblog chain with extraneous and out-of-date information removed and a link to and information on the new workbook.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
Popular fanmix and fan soundtrack website 8tracks recently announced that it will be shutting down on December 31, 2019. While the site might be available after this date, there’s no guarantee it will stay up - so if you’re a fanmix or fan soundtrack creator (or have created any type of playlist on 8tracks), now is a very good time to save the data from your playlists or make them available on another site.
What can I do to save my playlists?
If you’ve used 8tracks at any point, the site will be sending you an email with the playlist name, art, description and track list from your playlist(s), to help you recreate it/them on another site. It’s a good idea to make sure that you can still access the email address you used to sign up to 8tracks. Be sure to also check your spam folder for the email if you can’t find it in your inbox.
You can also use the Download Tracklist button in the notes of any playlist to copy all of the information from that playlist, and the “Save playlist to Spotify” button on top of the mix art to save a playlist to Spotify. Note that some of the tracks may be unavailable or not matched to Spotify’s catalog, particularly if they are older songs. Please also be aware that if you are saving someone else’s playlist, the playlist will not be attributed to the correct author when saving to Spotify - it will be saved under your name.
Other sites that can be used to create and share playlists of songs include Playmoss (a popular alternative to 8tracks) and YouTube.
Archiving links to fanmixes and fan soundtracks
Another very important thing to do is to use the Wayback Machine to archive the links to your favourite fanmixes and fan soundtracks. This can be done even if you don’t want to or aren’t able to republish the mix on another site. To do this, enter the URL of the mix in the box next to “Browse History” and select the button to see if it’s already archived. If not, you can select “Save this url in the Wayback Machine” to add it to the archive.
Be aware that saving playlists in the Wayback Machine will preserve the creator’s name, the description and the cover art, but not the track list - this can only be saved by downloading the text file.
Link your playlists on Fanlore!
Have you made a fanmix or fan soundtrack that you’re really proud of? Do you want other fans to be able to enjoy the links to your favourite mixes and soundtracks? Please add the links to Fanlore!
You can do this by finding the page for the fandom, ship, character, trope, fic, etc. that you made the mix for and adding it as an example fanwork. Anyone who has an account on Fanlore can edit the wiki - and it’s completely free! Follow this link to sign up to Fanlore, and check out our New Visitor Portal to find out how to get started with editing.
Some examples of Fanlore pages that feature playlists and mixes:
Thanks to vidderkidder , we now have an Excel spreadsheet that will archive the playlist info (note: the playlist text file will be in a json format, but using the spreadsheet is a super fast way to getting the metadata and the covers). **********************
Use the first sheet tab to paste your URLs and click the button to run.
What it will do:
*Extract relevant meta data from the playlist page and put it in your Excel Spreadsheet
*Download the JSON file with the playlist details to a folder on your desktop (8tracks)
*Download the cover photo for each playlist to a folder on your desktop (8tracks) What you should do:
*Paste urls on the first column of the first sheet tab
Create a folder on your desktop called 8tracks Click the button.
When you are done and you want to run a new batch copy the info to the second tab
Clear out the old urls and relevant info on the first tab and paste in the new urls and run again.
If you have any questions let me know. My email is [email protected]. I have assisted on projects to backup tumblr, Yahoo Groups and now 8tracks. I am the admin of vidders.net the largest streaming vidding network online. You can share this sheet with anyone who would like to do the same thing you are about to do Again if there are any questions just email.
