A couple of years ago I pondered what a 'non-linear' music application would be like. Rather than playlists being linear lists of tracks, they could branch and fork - a rock playlist could fork into indie rock and post-rock, etc. Listening to a playlist would be akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure - still a guided experience, but with some personal decision making sprinkled in.

I didn't end up building this. Instead I attempted to find a way to synthesise these forking journeys from collections of existing linear playlists.

After building some of the basic visualisations, the explorer further diverged from its original vision and evolved into a playlist 'gardening' tool that I used for splitting, merging, and pruning a range of my existing genre-homogenous playlists.

The feature I find the most useful is the "Playlist smoother" - it minimises the total "genre distance" between artists in a playlist. Artists that are the most similar to each other will often be neighbours in the playlist order.

I'm hoping that some people will find this useful for some of their own music 'gardening' tasks Some disclaimers: the authorisation flow is crap, performance is not amazing and the mobile UX is borderline unusable. Some of this can be attributable to inherent limitations of the Observable platform, and some my poor craftsmanship, so I must apologise.

Enjoy!