The iTunes playlists that Google automatically backs up to their cloud get hopeless cluttered with multiple versions of each song, til you reach the maximum size of 1000 songs. You can manually remove duplicates — one by one, folks! — but others crop up in their place.

It’s irritating. You can’t add any more songs to those playlist. When you play them, they repeat songs despite the “No repeat” setting. And downloading a playlist takes way more space and time than it should.

I searched for solutions, but all I’ve found is this Python script from GitHub. And to run it, you just need to install an API. And to run that, you just need to set up a WebClient. And to do that, you just need a Computer Science degree.

So I’m just going to live with the duplicate problem. Those aren’t my “real” playlists anyway–they’re just a backup. A free backup, at that. So it’s a little buggy. So be it.

Google music services: Take two.

I don’t know if you’ve tried to play a YouTube playlist in Chrome recently, but this week, I did. I found a nice 56-song playlist of live performances, started it off at song 1, and figured I’d have a good set of tunes going for a few hours while I worked away.

Only it kept repeating songs, sometimes just one, sometimes a loop of two or three. It took me a while to figure out that this happened whenever an ad played–every three songs or so. It seemed to then go back in the playlist instead of forward.

I could “reset” the playlist to the right song manually, but after the sixth or seventh time of doing that when all I wanted was a steady flow of tunes, I was getting really cranky.

I actually got to wondering if YouTube had a paid, ad-free version I could get instead. I was about ready to plunk my money down.

However, Google was not ready to take it. While they plan to launch subscription YouTube someday, it ain’t available yet.

But Google did help me out. Through their search engine I came across this solution:

1. Use Firefox, not Chrome
2. Add in the most wondrous (and free, no restart required) Firefox extension, Adblock Plus

After that, not only did the song repeating stop, so did all the ads! Woo hoo!

I’m sure many of you are like, “Duh!”, because you’ve been blocking browser ads for years, but if I’ve helped even one person not hear a song more times than they’d like (“these are my problems, my first-world problems”), my work here is done.