Tyla and I have been enjoying our Groove (Xbox Music) subscriptions. They work well on our phones, computers, Xboxes, etc. I have three main complaints about the service:
- I use it to play music through our whole-house FM transmitter. It crashes/stops pretty frequently and I have to restart it about once per day.
- There is no sharing of playlists. This is a huge negative for me. Sometimes I want to make my own lists, but very often I just want a curated list that somebody else generated. Or maybe I want to use the playlist that Tyla made of Elijah’s favorite songs. There’s no way to import/export or share playlists in Groove.
- There’s no family plan. Everyone buy’s their own subscription at full price.
With these thoughts in mind, I think we’re going to join the rest of the planet and switch to Spotify when our current subscriptions are up later this year. The first family member pays full price and additional family members are half price. It’s easy to switch but the only real pain point is moving our playlists over to Spotify. Manually recreating them would take forever.
There’s no great way to do this, but if you’re a geek, you can probably follow my vague instructions:
- Fire up Chrome. Browse to music.windows.com and open your playlist.
- Scroll down to make sure the whole playlist loads (it only grabs 50 songs at a time.)
- Press F12 to open the developer tools
- In the Elements tab, right click on the root HTML node and choose Copy.
- Paste that into notepad and save the file.
- Now you need to parse out the artist and song info. There are tons of possibilities here, but I used Power Query in Excel. Basically I filtered for the types of rows that had Artist and Titles. I stripped out all the extra info and voila. I built out a table with two columns: Artist and Title.
- I copied that table and went to Ivy. That site lets you create a Spotify playlist. It looks up each one of those songs in the Spotify catalog. You’re probably not going to find all of your songs in the Spotify catalog since the catalogs are different, but most of them will probably work.
- Ivy gives you a button to click that copies the playlist to your clipboard. Then you create a new playlist in Spotify and paste your clipboard into that playlist. Voila!
Easy? Nope. Hacky? Yep. But it saved me a bunch of time. There is an SDK for Groove but it doesn’t look like you can easily get playlist contents for a specific user. I started trying to code it up, but this was faster and I’ll never need to do it again anyway.
I guess we were a little burned out with all our grilling because we’ve been eating everything from the stove or the oven since that ended. We’ve been eating some great food though! We just tried a new recipe for chicken pasta with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes. It was deeeelicious! You can find the 
Job Change
One of the great things about being in a company like this is the opportunity for changing teams without changing companies. There are SO many things that I want to work on in this company that I’ll never scratch the surface. All it takes to change teams is a few emails, some interviews and bam, new job.
So for the first time in 9 years, I took advantage of that opportunity and I’m voluntarily changing to a new team. I’m going to stay in the big data technology space, but I’m swithcing to the Azure Compute team. This is one of the core groups inside of Microsoft Azure. Azure is the cloud computing offering from Microsoft. It started 4 years after the more popular “Amazon Web Services”, but it’s rapidly catching up according to Gartner’s latest report. You can also check out some of the recent financial disclosures to understand how Azure is one of the key bets for the future of the company and it’s going exceedingly well.
My new group handles the vast number of physical and virtual machines that are at the heart of the service. And my specific team is focused on customer analytics. Are you getting what you pay for when you use Azure? What areas are good or painful? What features can we add to make it even better? There is a LOT of telemetry and feedback data available and I’m eager to dip my hands into that pot.
While this feels like a brand new job, it’s awesome that my paycheck, benefits, title and commute are unchanged. Thanks to Microsoft for giving me so many opportunities to pursue my interests!