I’ve been following the tweets from an account called Albums You Must Hear @Albums2Hear. Each tweet is an album recommended by the account owner. I’m a sucker for lists of Albums That I Must Hear Before I Die since I’m always interested in new (or not so new) music recommendations.

I wanted to assemble a list of the albums that I don’t have from this account and I was able to do so using R.

Using rtweet, it was possible to pull a list of all the albums and reorganise them so that I had a csv containing the albums with the artist and year. I could then use this to compare with a list of albums from my iTunes library. A snippet of the retrieved records is shown here (full list is here).

The code for retrieval is here. The output is csv can be used to compare with a list of your own records.

library(rtweet)
library(httpuv)
library(stringr)
all_tweets <- get_timeline("Albums2Hear", n = 1500)
albums <- all_tweets$text
albums <- gsub("#albumsyoumusthear ","",albums)
tempdf <- as.data.frame(str_split_fixed(albumV, " - ", 3))
colnames(tempdf) <- c("Artist","Album","YearURL")
tempdf2 <- as.data.frame(str_split_fixed(tempdf$YearURL, " ", 2))
colnames(tempdf2) <- c("Year","URL")
df <- data.frame(y$Artist,y$Album,z$Year)
colnames(df) <- c("Artist","Album","Year")
write.csv(df,file = "albums2hear.csv")

Thanks to whoever runs the account – they ask for support here.

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The post title comes from ‘Til I Die by The Beach Boys from Sunflower/Surf’s Up.