Export formats
When exporting playlists, Spinitron adds heading rows describing the playlist (title, DJ, date, time, etc.) followed by the playlist’s spins in chronological order. There are no such heading rows when you export search or chart results or other reports.
We distinguish between table formats and text formats
- In table formats each enabled field of the data is separately and clearly delineated, even when a field has no value. Table formats work for any kind of data: playlists or search, chart or other reports.
- Text formats are mainly intended for exporting playlists. Spins are formatted like natural-language sentences using punctuation and keywords to separate fields. Text formats work best with only the core playlist fields enabled. The checkbox fields (request, new, local, and various artists) are represented by abbreviations R , N , L , and V/A . Text format can also work for spin search results, depending on the fields you enable, but won’t work well for other reports.
The HTML formats produce an HTML fragment and not a whole HTML document. You can use the fragment in, for example, a blog or forum, or in an HTML email, etc. You can use either the formatted HTML or the markup.
Rich text fields (e.g. song note, playlist description) require special handling for export. Spinitron exports them with their original formatting only in the HTML formats and converts to plain text for export in the other formats. Export to TSV converts newlines in a rich text field to \n .
You can experiment with the formats to see what the formatted data looks like using the “copy-paste” export delivery method and the back button.
CSV and TSV
- CSV - comma separated values
- TSV - Tab separated values
These table formats export data for import into other computer programs. Both are widely supported. Use whichever works best for you. We tend to prefer TSV because, as Spinitron users, we don’t need CSV (since there are no tab and newline characters our data) and we avoid the tricky gotchas with CSV. If you want to copy a table from Spinitron and paste it into another program, try TSV first.
Text table (slash separator)
This is a plain-text table format intended for reading by a human. It can be used in plain-text email and similar media. Fields are separated by the three-character sequence / , i.e. space slash space. There is room for ambiguity in this format since neither the / character nor the / sequence is uncommon in playlists (examples).
Plain text
This text format produces a playlist for reading by a human using only plain-text, i.e. without typographic formatting.
HTML text
This text format is like the plain text format but with the addition of typographic formatting using HTML. Each spin is enclosed in a <p> element while the playlist heading fields are <li> elements in a <ul> list.
HTML table
This table format outputs your playlist or report a an HTML table.
Microsoft Excel
This table format is suitable for any data. Many computer programs accept date in Excel file format.