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A month ago I posted that I wanted to try Rdio, but could not because even their native OS X application requires Flash which I don’t have installed on my laptop. However—although I have not seen a formal announcement—it now appears that they are bundling a version of Flash in with the application.

So I re-activated my Rdio subscription—I had tried the service out a year or so ago—and used the application to match my iTunes music and add it to my Rdio collection.

Setting Up A Scores Playlist

At work I like to listen to movie scores as they typically contain no lyrics which I find distracting when I am writing code. So I set up a ‘Scores’ playlist in Rdio and went to start adding movie score albums to it.

The problem? Rdio only lets you add songs to playlists one at a time—you cannot add an entire album. Adding an album to a playlist one song at a time becomes very tedious very quickly and despite numerous requests to allow adding an album to a playlist, Rdio has yet to add this feature.

Therefore I created a bookmarklet that when clicked on an album page on Rdio adds the entire album—all the tracks that are available for streaming at least—to the chosen playlist.

Using The Bookmarklet

1. Drag the link above to the bookmarks bar in your browser.
2. Go to an album page on Rdio in your browser. For example: The Dark Knight.
3. Click the ‘Add Album To Playlist’ bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar.
4. For the first track you will be asked which playlist to add the track to and all subsequent tracks will then be added to that same playlist.
5. Wait for the bookmarklet to add the remaining tracks to the playlist—you will see some flickering of Rdio dialogs appearing and being automatically clicked—and once it has finished a JavaScript dialog will appear telling you how many tracks were added to the playlist.

Fragile

As you can tell by the flickering of Rdio dialogs when you use the bookmarklet, this works by basically automating the task of adding each individual track to the playlist. This means that any HTML or CSS changes to the Rdio site will likely break the bookmarklet.

I will be trying to keep the bookmarklet up to date and working if this happens, but I cannot guarantee the timeliness of my support. I have only really tested the bookmarklet in Chrome so let me know if you encounter any issues in other browsers. Also, note that I am not responsible for any problems caused by using this bookmarklet. Hopefully Rdio will add this feature soon and we will not need this hack for much longer.

For those that are interested, here is my scores playlist.

Update: Rdio added support for adding entire albums to playlists in the new Rdio so this bookmarklet is no longer required or supported.