Posting Spinitron playlists to Folk-DJ

Here’s how to post Spinitron playlists to Folk-DJ. These instructions will be useful to anyone who works for a radio station that uses Spinitron to create and collect playlists for its shows and programmers.

Spinitron is a paid playlist service. It is used by many radio stations. If your station does not use Spinitron, these instructions do not apply to you. There is no facility to allow an individual programmer to post to Spinitron. It is always contracted by a radio station and then used by all of the programs at that station.

A station that uses Spinitron can integrate its service with the station’s website and broadcast stream. For example, WRUW uses Spinitron to publish past playlists to individual program pages within the site. It is also used to populate the “Now playing” information that appears on the station’s home page in real time. The same information from Spinitron is embedded in WRUW’s broadcast stream so it can be seen on whatever device you use to listen to them.

For programs that are recorded in advance, Spinitron lets you create the playlist in advance, specifying the exact time that each song will air. Then the site and stream can be updated automatically by Spinitron in real time while the show is on the air with no additional interaction from anyone.

Spinitron makes it very easy to post a playlist to Folk-DJ.

Here is how to do it:

Start on the Spinitron home page and select the playlist that you want to post:

Once you’ve opened the playlist, select the choice to “Export/Email” your playlist:

That should bring you to a screen where you can choose which data you want to include, what format you want it in, and how you want it delivered:

Choose Artist, Song, and Album (“Release”). Select the format “Text table (slash separator), and then select “Copy-paste” for your delivery option. The choices that you make in this section are kept by the Spinitron site, so they will become your default until or unless you change them again.

Once you’ve made those selections, click the “Display” button and you should be taken to a screen where you can simply copy your selected data in your selected format:

You can omit the headings of your show name and so on, posting just the actual playlist in an email to Folk-DJ. Note that Spinitron also shows the number of “rows” (songs) in this playlist, so you can easily include that in the email header that you post to Folk-DJ.

The only other thing to keep the process simple is to maintain an email template in Gmail that has the basic boilerplate of the format that you want for your email, including the email header and the signature at the end.

Here is an example of an email template in Gmail. Once you load this template, you just have four steps to complete the posting:

1) Add the number of songs (between the parentheses) and the date of the show (between the commas) to the email header,
2) Copy and paste the actual playlist data from Spinitron into the body of the email,
3) Add “Folk-DJ” as the recipient, and
4) Click “Send”.

If you use a different email application, you will have to discover how templates are created in your system, but nearly every email system has a way to do this.

Posting a playlist from Spinitron to Folk-DJ should take 2-3 minutes at most.