Today I opened Spotify and noticed a new service called TuneMyMusic. It moves playlists from other platforms straight over to Spotify, syncing them into new playlists. The first thing I thought of was the 1,088 songs in my NetEase Cloud Music library.
NetEase Cloud Music had always been my music app. Over 10-plus years I'd hearted more than a thousand songs. But listening from outside the country is a hassle: you need a VPN, what Chinese speakers call "climbing a ladder" over the wall. Back when I lived inside the wall, I had to climb out; now that I'm outside, I have to climb back in. It's a little funny when I think about it, like the fortress besieged, where those outside want in and those inside want out. Switching music apps is genuinely painful, because you have to retrain the recommendation algorithm. Not switching means worrying about when the ladder will stop working.
Last year I tried searching song by song. Moving from the old platform to a new one meant typing each title character by character and working out which artist it was. If it didn't turn up, I'd switch between traditional and simplified Chinese, or look up the original Japanese, or check for an English title. Russian songs meant taking a screenshot, running text recognition, and copying the result. It was far too much work, and I gave up after 30 songs. AI was already around back then, but it never even crossed my mind to ask whether it could solve this.
This time I clicked in, and NetEase Cloud Music wasn't on the list. Yep, as expected. You could upload a URL or paste a TXT, but also as expected, it couldn't parse a NetEase playlist URL.
After half a second of thought, I turned to Claude (Codex would work too, of course) and gave it the playlist URL. In just 30 seconds it scraped the title, artist, and album of all 1,088 songs into a CSV file. I uploaded that to TuneMyMusic, it recognized the file, and it found 984 of the songs.
In the past this might have meant 10 hours of grumbling and swearing, followed by a big meal to vent, and even then I might not have gotten the same result. This time it took a minute, start to finish.
It wasn't the only way AI has changed my life lately. I've been a Windows user for 25 years, and a few days ago I got my first MacBook. All the logic and every keyboard shortcut had to be relearned; getting going was a real struggle. I wanted the desktop to rotate photos, a new one every day. Doing it myself meant downloading images one at a time, and once I'd set up the rotation, it just didn't move, for no reason I could figure out. So in a fit of anger I turned to AI. It recommended Irvue, which installed without a hitch and now rotates photos from Unsplash. Installing apps was the same story: look in the App Store first, and if it's not there, download it from the official site, then drag it into the install folder yourself (I still don't know what that's called). It all took up far too much of my brain's CPU, so I just told Claude what I wanted and let it handle everything with Homebrew. Updates too.
Then there were the files in Google Drive, in Youdao Note, in Summit Tea, the ones that started more than ten years ago and have been piling up ever since. I've reorganized them a few times over the years, and every time it nearly killed me. Now, with computer use and various MCPs turned on, I let it reorganize everything around my habits, and saved dozens of hours of precious life.
For this term's Tea and Tea Table Aesthetics course handouts, which I used to make in WPS as Docx and PPT files, I had Claude learn the format. I just say what the next class will cover, it fiddles around for a bit, and out comes the handout. The layout is even better looking.
Strangely enough, I've been using AI for over a year, yet it never occurred to me to move a lot of my old files onto an AI-based way of working, just like those 30 songs last year. It took switching laptops, with my familiar methods no longer working, for the old saying to come true: when you hit a dead end, you change, and once you change, a way opens up.
Switching to a computer I didn't know turned out to be the biggest time-saver I've had lately.
AI keeps getting better, but for those of us from the generations before AI natives, our brains sometimes just don't make the switch. For a lot of things that now have a better way, if I weren't pushed to that point, I'd probably keep doing them the old way, and whatever was uncomfortable before would stay just as uncomfortable. I'd still be climbing the wall just to listen to music.
Some people will probably think: so what? People who can write a scraper have been moving playlists this way for ages, and Homebrew has been around forever. True, none of this is new technology, and what I lacked was never the tools.
The wall I really needed to climb was in my head.
Once you have that AI mindset, a lot of things can simply be solved with AI. The point is to realize it and give it a try. You may save time for things that matter more, and stop letting irritating, repetitive work hold you back. If you've got something you've put off for ages, something that annoys you just to think about, maybe it's just that an old map can't lead you down a new road.
As for the 104 songs that weren't found, Claude is already working on them.
Now I'm off to listen to my music, very pleased with myself!