Some long desired features are on the horizon but some necessary design/infrastructure changes caused some of the existing feature sets to break. This means that I needed an intermediate release to correct the new glitches that have come up with the infrastructure upgrades but push the features until we get more user testing on them. The next "minor" release should contain all of the features I've been building (including importing/exporting playlist links and webhooks).

Added

• I've changed the way some of the API calls are processed and altered the getMasterPlaylists API method. It now returns the full list of playlist links with the existing MasterPlaylist object. This is the first step to being able to export your playlist links for backup/sharing. The next version will implement this feature in the UI. The UI will also be able to import using existing API functions.
• Some database changes were also required for some upcoming features including the ability to suppress playlist description logs (#33)

Fixed

• Another maintenance update. This time to increase the version for PHP and the Spotify API library. Things should be relatively invisible [now], but upgrades were necessary to continue being secure and stable.
• Linked playlists can once again be unlinked. New strict type-casting in PHP 8.2+ and non-dynamic variables made for some errors that were not caught in conditional statements. In some cases PHP would previously return a 1 as true instead of an integer. So we were outputting as a string explicitly instead and then checking for "1" in the UI. We can now check for an integer or bool in the front end to avoid these odd situations.

Known Issues

• When creating new links to a playlist the Action Buttons are not always built correctly. Closing the Edit Links modal and reopening seems to correct it for now. I assume this is somehow a type-error in the JS library. I will need to track this down further.
• When updating the links of a list and then returning to the list of Master Lists clicking refresh can sometimes fill a toast with the JSON of your master lists and it's history, rather than updating it directly behind the scene. I am currently investigating the cause. A workaround is to just refresh the page with your browser for now.

Fixed

• Spotify used to limit playlist lengths based on a soft limit. We could request a maximum of 100 songs at a time and if we exceeded a maximum playlist length by those extra few songs then we would be okay. No longer. They have a hard limit of 10,000 songs per playlist. Existing playlists seem to be immune to the issue but we are unable to add songs to those lists or any other beyond the hard limit now. This has forced us to rework the way we add songs to your master lists. We now stop exactly at your limit. Theoretically there might be cases where we have less than your limit given excluded songs and songs to remove from a list but a subsequent scan should bring it close to your limit. We will never add more than the limit though (currently 5,000 for Basic users and 10,000 for VIP users) Issue #27
• We finally found and fixed a minor display bug that linked to an invalid page on Spotify if you clicked through to a master playlist in certain circumstances. #24

Here's an early Valentines Day present:

Introducing: Special Playlists. These are playlists that don't actually exist on Spotify, but we let you link link to a Master Playlist anyway. Read on for more explanation as to what they are and why you should care.

New

• We've added the ability to link your Liked Songs to a Master Playlist. This feature was one of the first requested features since the release of 2.0 so it's nice to finally get it done. Thanks for your patience! (Issue: #6)
• We've also added 3 new Special Playlists that are normally completely hidden from a user in the Spotify apps. Because we can access the Spotify backend, we can get access to your top tracks over certain periods. We use this to give you access to your Top played tracks of the last 4 weeks, 6 months, and all time. You can exclude these from a Master Playlist to keep it fresh, or include them to populate it with the very best of your library. Enjoy!
• These two features above will require two additional scopes to your account. Both of these grant the app read-only access to view your library and your top tracks. If you have not previously given Intellimerge permission to access these portions of your Spotify account, you will be prompted the next time you login to Intellimerge with a request to add them. As always, we ONLY use permissions as required to provide you the services we claim to give you. We never cache the data we get from your account or save it for analysis or to share with any third parties. You can refresh yourself of our privacy policy and [how we use your data on our About/FAQ Page](writhem.net/intellimerge/about.php#privacy) however if you choose to not sign-in to the new version everything will continue to work as it did before the new version.

Fixed

• Hopefully we've fixed some caching issues reported by a chrome-mobile user that was suffering from cached data thanks to chrome's data saver functionality. We now instruct the browser not to cache the variables on the playlist editor page. All images, and scripts should still be cached as it was before. Time will tell if this solves it entirely though... Please report your experience on the github issue if you continue to see any adverse effects: Issue #23

Planned but deferred

We wanted to include these features in this major release, but would rather release these features sooner than making you wait until all of them are done.

• The ability to follow/anti-follow an artist. #12
• The ability to support podcasts in master playlists.

Fixed

• Just a minor update to fix an out-of-bounds error on the manual queue button once we changed the DB field to TIMESTAMP from DATETIME. Clicking the queue for refresh button should now set the last update date to one second past Jan 1, 1970 instead of one second past Jan 1, 0000.

Fixed

• Further improvements made to the race-condition checking.
• Some weird scrolling was going on on the FAQ page. Fixed that up and made anchors more responsive. (Issue #15)

Fixed

• Finally found that duplicates glitch pointed out in Issue #10. Was a race condition that if two update threads were running at the same time, they didn't properly claim the task for themselves. To remove any duplicates that IntelliMerge may have added you can either remove them manually or you can remove all songs and let it rebuild entirely. Sorry about that!

Fixed

• When the DB is unavailable for whatever reason the user experience was really bad. Added some additional error handling and output (Issue: #11)
• Was not properly encoding the history id as an integer which was leading to huge overhead in the output of the base62 ids. Corrected.
• We were outputting the dates in the history table based on a non-ISO format. We've corrected that. (Issue: #13)

This one is all about history, a minor bug fix, and some privacy enhancements.

New

• We've added the ability to see the history of your Master Playlists in the settings view of each Master Playlist. (Issue: #1)
• We now respect the Do-Not-Track feature of your browser and allow you to opt-out of analytics tracking. This is a per-device setting but allows you to request us to not track your device and the actions you take on it. We do rely on this information to develop features but wanted to respect your privacy first. You can find this setting in your profile page or the about page under the Privacy question. (Issue: #8)

Changed

• We now pull the changelog (since 2.0) from GitHub directly. This means we'll have fancier looking news options and the ability to see it via github.com/WritheM/IntelliMerge/releases. We also cache it from GitHub so if they are down or overloaded it wont affect our changelog :-)

Fixed

• Properly encoding the titles of Master Playlists means that when the name of your playlist contains characters like ™ it'll display that exactly as you enter it. Additionally spaces between words is not replaced by a + anymore. (Issue: #9)

May the fourth be with you... Just a small update on this one that affects the Updater.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that was erroneously marking accounts for purge

Celebrate! 2.0! We have performed a complete re-write of the front-end and most of the backend. Please verify that your master playlists and their links have been correctly migrated from v1.x. I did my best to ensure everything was correct but with over 1100 users and 10k links, I couldn't look at every little thing.

Changed

• I have added a few limitations... This should allow more room for new users. Included is a limit to the number of Master Playlists that can be created/enabled at once. If you've already created more than the new limit, we've disabled your newest playlists that you've created. You are free to disable and enable your Master Playlists as you please to ensure you can have them all updated but if you remove any, you won't be able to create new ones to replace them. Thank you for being an early adopter!
• There is a new way of setting Master Playlists to not remove old songs. Instead of including the Master Playlist in itself, we have now created a full option for it. The updater should auto-migrate this setting upon first scan, or you can set it manually in the Master Playlist settings.

New

• We have added the ability to upgrade your account to a premium level, that comes with premium perks. As a thank you to our early adopters, we are offering 3 months of free VIP to all users (no purchase necessary) or 50% off a paid subscription, effectively giving you 6 months for free when you sign up for an annual subscription. These discount codes will only work until the end of May so act fast. For the 3 months free use IMFS3FREE and for the 6 months free use IMFS50OFF during checkout, which can be started from the new Profile page once logged in.
• We've implemented ajax loading, which should make the interface seem much more responsive and subsequently makes less hits to the Spotify API, which means we won't get as many errors. It will also be much easier to manage large collections with many links. We implemented a long over-due change in the requirements from the Spotify API which means we don't have to store the owner of a playlist anymore in the local database, keeping true with our privacy policy that ensures we only store exactly what we need.

Fixed

• We changed the way we handle errors in the updater. Previously if an error happened, we'd log it, save it (for 24 hours), then move onto the next user. Now we also roll-back the change in the database for that user... this ensures that they get a second attempt (or third, etc) when updating. If 5 errors are detected in a row, then we'll skip this update cycle and try again at next interval.
• Fixed a bug that would continue editing a playlist if it errored out while fetching the included or excluded playlists... this used to lead to most of your songs removed and then added again in the next update. Now it will only add/remove songs to a Master Playlist once it has finished successfully scanning all of the linked playlists for that Master Playlist.