One of the current bugbears concerning Spotify is that it’s often difficult to find out what’s new on the service. Aside from offering the “What’s new” homepage selection and occasionally highlighting big releases in the official blog, Spotify has pretty much left us alone to dig through the catalogue and unearth new stuff. What a chore.

Until fairly recently, Spotify issued regular Google spreadsheets containing information about all new releases. Unfortunately, due to a change in the way music is added to the service, this was discontinued. The information contained in the spreadsheets was also used by recommendation services such as Spotify.fm and Last.fm + Spotify, plus a whole host of other websites and blogs, negatively affecting all of them.

Afront and Pansentient League stepped in to host the New On Spotify tool, producing a list of new additions to the Spotify catalogue from the previous week. But when was Spotify going to do something to rectify the situation? Thankfully, the wait may be over.

New releases on Spotify is a tool created by Spotify’s lead creative Rasmus Andersson. It presents the latest albums added to the Spotify catalogue over the last 7 days, with the results sorted by artist popularity. And it’s really useful. Among the big new releases highlighted this week are Tear The Signs Down by The Automatic, Brother by Boyzone, and Plastic Beach by Gorillaz (more of which tomorrow).

Improvements would still be welcome. Sorting by artist popularity isn’t particularly useful, particularly as that very popular act “Various Artists” somewhat gets in the way. It would be preferable to sort by artist name, and also to separate albums, singles and compilations. (The PHP source code is available if any programmers would like to give it a tweak…) And, of course, it would be very useful if this could be integrated into the Spotify client. Here’s hoping. You can see new releases on Spotify here.

Playify, a new Spotify app launched last week by Kenneth Auchenberg, allows you to play your iTunes music in Spotify. The app compares your iTunes music library to the Spotify catalogue, and produces a list of available music.

All you need to do is upload your iTunes Music Library .xml file. The search takes a couple of minutes, and you’re ready to go. Clicking on an album cover will play that album in Spotify. You can then sort the music by album, artist, most played, or “Playifyable” – i.e. the music that Playify has found in the Spotify catalogue. Playify is limited by the Spotify API limit, so if it can’t resolve your query right now you might need to try again later.

Or alternatively, try the confusingly-similarly-named Playlistify, which “bakes” Spotify playlists from uploaded iTunes playlists. Playlistify also allows you to share playlists, and browse playlists shared by others. More great examples of innovation in the Spotify community.

The Spotify Alarm is a neat little piece of software designed by Karlskrona digital media students. It allows users to wake up to their favourite track by setting the alarm and entering the chosen track’s URL. Like most of the best ideas, it’s simple, and fun. The only downside is that it’s Mac-only. It’s available for PC and Mac, but requires that you have Adobe AIR installed. You can download the app, for free, by clicking on the image below.