Spotify’s new Smart Reorder tool gives one of its best features a handy upgrade — and it's already saving me hours of tweaking

• Spotify has rolled out an upgrade for its Mixed playlist feature
• Smart Reorder automatically rearranges songs according to their BPM and key
• It makes it easier and less time-consuming for you to create custom transitions between songs

When Spotify launched its Mixed playlist feature last year, I was enthralled with how it immediately puts you in the DJ’s shoes, and now mixing playlists in Spotify just got easier with Smart Reorder, which is rolling out to Premium subscribers.

Creating a Mixed playlist is a great way to get creative with your personal playlists. It's all fun and games — until you realize how much work is involved. Rearranging the order of songs so that each BPM or key matches the next is tedious work, but it’s the best way to guarantee seamless transitions. Smart Reorder takes that chore away.

It’s also very easy to enable, which is the added bonus. When you create a Mixed playlist, or you enable Mix on a standard playlist, all you have to do is tap the 'Edit’ button which will load the playlist editing page.

At the bottom you’ll see the new Smart Reorder tool. Tap that and it will rearrange your playlist according to BPM and key — taking away the dirty work.

Since launching the Mix feature last year, Spotify claims that “premium users around the world have streamed over 220 million hours of their Mixed playlists”, proving that it’s one of the streaming platform’s most valued music listening functions. It came shortly after Apple Music unveiled its own AutoMix tool, which uses AI to match beats, but Spotify’s version puts you in full control of the DJ decks.

I rather enjoyed Apple’s approach to this, but then Spotify totally stole its thunder and I’ve made numerous Mixed playlists since. Now it’s a whole new game with Smart Reorder, and it’s already a huge time-saver.

DJing just got smoother

The best thing about Smart Reorder is that it works well with fresh Mixed playlists, as well as existing ones which you’ve already manually reordered and mixed. If you’re new to Mixed playlists and find the creative and reordering side a bit daunting, Smart Reorder is a good place to start.

You don’t have to think too much about it. The best advice I’d give would be to simply add loads of songs to a playlist just to build it up, don’t worry about the order. Once you have a solid foundation for a playlist, that's when you can enable Smart Reorder so that your selection of songs follow each other smoothly, and their BPMs and keys are matched. Then you can dive into each individual transition to edit your blends.

If you already have a playlist that you’ve mixed and reordered yourself, it works just the same. But what about your custom transitions? Don’t worry, they remain untouched.

When you enable Smart Reorder on a Mixed playlist with custom transitions, it gives you the option to keep these in their order, and will only rearrange songs with ‘auto’ transitions meaning all your hard work will stay put. However, if you want to completely overhaul your Mixed playlist with a fresh order of songs, that option is also there, and it could provide the groundwork for you create better transitions.

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