Basically I want to display the current track on a website.
I already searched quite a bit for a possibility to get notified when player state (play/pause, track, current position) changes.
My question:
Is it possible to get notified (socket, hook call) or is the only possibility I have to call the Web API like every second and fetch the state?
I fear that I'm running into rate limits when multiple users connect their accounts and display the current track.
Nope, there's still no way to do that. To achieve what you'd like, you need to pool the Spotify API continuously.
You can however use the Spotify SDK that you can pass a function to be executed on playback state change. The SDK is incompatible with a few platforms (see supported browsers), but for those you could catch the SDK initialization error and then switch to continuous polling via the API. You will have a lot fewer requests then.
A second option would be to only update the currently playing song after the last song should have ended. When getting the playback state for the currently playing song, you could use the field duration_ms and progress_ms to calculate the remaining time of the song. Then schedule another API requests for when the song should have ended and you're good. Whether that's a good strategy for your use case or not depends on the type of playback and how often the playback changes in your app.
I hope I could help!
As of now, it seems to be possible to receive player state events with a listener:
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk/guide/#playback-information-display
I haven't tested the Web version, I'm currently using the analogous Android APIs, and Android's seems to work for play/pause change and track change (but not for position change)
Related
I want to write a program that writes the music name to a social network status. When changing a track in Spotify, I can get the name of the music, but I don't know how to get a notification when changing music.
How do I get a callback when changing a track in Spotify's API?
You might be able to use the Web Playback SDK with player-state-changed to get these events, but this will depend on what you are going to write your programme in but it might help to look at this and see if it does what you need
I am planning to create a mobile application for android and ios users, i think i will take a try with xamarin since i will be alone on this project and i don't have a lots of time.
I want that the mobile app for both platform get datas from the api, then if there is new datas available we notify the user by a notification.
How the mobile will work in that kind of project? I mean should i make a background service then check every x seconds/minutes by http request? In that case which time interval? Should i use websockets instead for this case?
The app might be used by many people, so i would to know the scenario in this kind of project: Getting very fast changes, without overload the server due to too many connects or whatever else.
I'm confused about this and i need some lights around, any mobile application/server experiences related would be apprecied!
EDIT:
As suggered by an user, here additional infos:
The api is homemade, restful using JWT made in NodeJS.
Each users on their device should get messages from server asap, even when the app is in background/closed.
Maybe in the future a way to send messages between users themselves.
You have to implement push notification.
It is quite easy to implement this in xamarin. just send the push notification to the device and on the notification received call back send the API request to retrieve the updated data.
Here is the document for sending push notification from custom API.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/push/pushapi
I'm not a mobile developer, so take this with a grain of salt.
The answer to this really depends on what you're doing, which informs how often to check the API. If it's a messaging app, for example, you could have it check every couple minutes to see if there are undelivered messages, then check more frequently for the next X minutes (to facilitate a conversation in real time).
If it's a GPS navigation app to be used while driving, you'd need much more frequent requests.
As for the API, that also depends on what type of API and the number of requests you can make to it. Is it a commercial API that you get x number of calls per hour on? Is it an API that you built? Etc.
Basically, you need to give more information in order to get more specific answers.
I need to know when the user changes the song that is "currently playing".
Currently, I'm using https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/player/currently-playing to get the information about the song that is "currently playing". But, I need to know when it changes to the next one (not only because the song finished, but also when the user press NEXT SONG button).
My current workaround is to call the https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/player/currently-playing endpoint every second, but I'll be out of the rate limit if I do it very often.
You are doing it right. You need to poll the https://api.spotify.com/v1/me/player/currently-playing endpoint to detect changes in the playback state.
In some scenarios it can be suitable to use Spotify's web playback SDK, which exposes a player_state_changed event. For this to work the user needs to have a premium account and the playback needs to happen on the device created by the SDK.
I'm working on a Spotify app where I'd like for users to be able to click on track names and be linked to the track page, just like in other Spotify apps. I'd like to prevent the song from beginning playback, though.
SoundDrop seems to do this. You can click on a track name and the song doesn't interrupt playback by SoundDrop.
I'm not sure how to implement this alternative behavior. Any ideas?
The Apps API uses standard JavaScript stuff, so if you attach a handler to the track link and use e.preventDefault(), that should prevent Spotify playing the track and you can then do your own custom handling.
More discussion on e.preventDefault() is here: event.preventDefault() vs. return false
I am building an app that needs to know if a track is playable in the user's region.
It's easy to check the basic territorial restrictions of a track using the Metadata API. However, I am encountering tracks that the Metadata API says are out of my region, but are auto-linked to versions of the same track that aren't region locked. ie. Metadata says I can't play a track, but as far as the user is concerned, Spotify can play that track.
Here's an example:
'Sweet Unrest' by Apparat # spotify:track:4H4h3ulzjGVox14GHiCEoo
I am in the UK (territory code GB)
The lookup link is http://ws.spotify.com/lookup/1/.json?uri=spotify:track:4H4h3ulzjGVox14GHiCEoo
There is no GB code in the resulting territories string, so in theory, I should not be able to play the track. However, in the main Spotify player, I can see that it is auto linked to spotify:track:11S6TQybYumAnNApugZWSJ which is playable in my region. If I paste the supposedly unplayable track's URI into the top left Spotify search box, it plays.
Is there an API based way to check for tracks like this?
You can detect whether a track is playable or not using an undocumented property of each track: data.availableForPlayback
Track.fromURI("spotify:track:XXX", function(track) {
alert(track.data.availableForPlayback);
});
If you run the code above, you should get a True/False that does what you're after.
Unfortunately not, not at this time. The linking is actually done by the client itself rather than any of our backend services, so none of our APIs have this information.