I listen to music all day long as a work. The beat keeps me moving like a caller keeping rowers synchronized.

While I pay for Apple Music streaming but also have a big mp3 library which is aging. When I removed the mp3s leaving only streamed tracks, my Playlist lost many of my favorite Artists. That lead me to creating a Smart Playlists of Artists.

Just like when I write code for Web Apps, I broke the problem down to individual steps...

Step 1: Copy all the tracks in the playlist to the clipboard. Paste into a text file, open in Excel, copy the Artist column, paste into another text file and save as Artists.txt.

Step 2: Prepare the file by removing duplicates and sorting in in reverse, z to a. I used BBEdit. The reason for the reverse sort is that when you add items to Smart Playlists by clicking + on the first row, the first item will be at the bottom and the last item will be at the top.

Step 3: Add the Artists to a Smart Playlist. I used Keyboard Maestro to read the file and for each row, switch to Music, click the + button, and then paste the Artist name. I added about 500 Artists in about 4 minutes with a .3 sec pause between.

Here's the Keyboard Maestro Macro.

Next thing I need to think about is manging updates!