Boombox & my playlist







I started my playlist on March 30th, 2021, nearly 2 years ago. I don’t remember my exact rationale, but I wanted a curation of songs I liked. So, I went on YouTube and created a playlist. I maintained that playlist for a while, problems compounded, as problems tend to do. These issues, like skepticism of just how random the shuffle feature was, led to me creating my own little playlist system on v3 of my website. It still used YouTube internally (both this and Boombox do), but I had a lot more control.

A screenshot of some text on the old playlist page with a header that says "770 songs in playlist" and text that reads "I've been adding songs to my YouTube playlist for a while now, but I've started to see a pattern emerge. The YouTube playlist shuffler seems to be algorithmic, and not fully random. After being few up with listening to the same few songs over and over, I created this page in order to fullfill my true random shuffling needs. Click any video to open it in a small player that plays audio through a hidden YouTube iframe on this page."

This worked for a while, but then I ran into more problems. My site was static, so I had to rebuild the entire thing whenever I updated my playlist. Additionally, whenever a video was removed, I’d have no way to know which one had been removed, and would be perpetually mocked by the text “Unavailable videos are hidden.” This sparked the creation of an entirely separate site, which I gave the moniker of Boombox, and I’ve been listening to music through Boombox since.

Unfortunately, ordering was lost, as both YouTube and my old playlist system sorted videos based on the YouTube ordering. However, Boombox sorts them by date, and I had periodically gone back and swapped out videos for other videos due to things like removal.

Today, I finally got around to adding a song total to Boombox, and―just for fun―a rough measure of how much music is actually in my playlist.

And holy peck, there’s an obscene amount.

A screenshot of some text on the Boombox front page that reads "There are 941 songs, and it would take you roughly 40 days to listen to them all."

40 days of non-stop music… that’s astounding. It’s actually around 2 days and 10 hours, I screwed up the code in a hilariously obvious way.

✶ ✶ ✶