Getting spotify desktop player status - spotify

I come from an electronics background, with a project whereby I'd like to be able to obtain various information about the state of the desktop player, eg
Current track name
Current track artist
Position in song
Play/pause status
Is there an active API or other method which will allow me to obtain this information and get it out of the desktop app itself, such that I might be able to send that information out via a COM port?
Thanks in advance.

You could use my .NET Library SpotifyAPI .NET
It combines the spotify-local and spotify-web API.
Also, it provides all your required information and is simple to use.
Small example:
SpotifyLocalAPIClass spotify = new SpotifyLocalAPIClass();
if(!spotify.Connect())
return;
SpotifyMusicHandler mh = spotify.GetMusicHandler();
SpotifyEventHandler eh = spotify.GetEventHandler();
Console.WriteLine(mh.GetCurrentTrack().GetTrackName());

Related

Is it possible to play an entire song using the Spotify API?

I know that it's possible to access a user's songs using the Spotify API, but is it possible to automatically play a given one also using the API (i.e. is there some method (like 'play') that automatically plays the song on the user's device given the song name that you already retrieved?). Thanks!
No, libspotify is only an API to fetch data so to speak.
What you do get from it is the callback music_delivery(sp_session *session, const sp_audioformat *format, const void *frames, int num_frames), which as you can see contains frames, which is raw audio that needs to be played by another framework for example.
I'd suggest reading Spotify's examples in order to learn how to use this.

Is it possible to control the spotify desktop client from a browser with custom controls?

I am a developer for playmoss where users can create playlists with different music services.
We are planning on adding Spotify support to our playlists in a way similar to what bop.fm does.
Context
Taking for example this playlist (in which all songs are available on spotify, at least in Spain)…
https://bop.fm/p/o12l
…if we have the spotify client installed in our computer (tested with a Mac)
As soon as the playlist starts playing we can click the spotify icon on the top right [picture]and we will be playing the songs through spotify.
Using the bop.fm control interface we can pause, play, skip next, even skip to a point in the track with progress bar.
This is similar but even more powerful than the official spotify play button, see an example here:
http://jsfiddle.net/insonorizate/a5jf39yn/
With the play button there is previous, play, pause, next functionality but not seek.
Of course it can not be customized in any way nor called from javascript.
(in bop.fm is possible to open a debuger console and call
Bop.Player.pause()
or
Bop.Player.play()
to pause or play the track beeing played in bop.fm via spotify)
Fiddling a little with the bop.fm page there are some interesting things. Ther is an iframe in the main page poiting to:
https://embed.spotify.com/remote-control-bridge/
Viewing this iframe source we find something like this:
// Expose the OAuth Token to the Javascript
var tokenData = 'NAowChgKB1Nwb3RpZnkSABoGmAEByAEBJReQCFQSFG2Ynvz1oBKgxv2mE1XXz_1Au-cg';
// Pass the remote control to the bridge
var remoteControlBridge = new Spotify.RemoteControlBridge();
remoteControlBridge.init(tokenData);
There's no documentation for Spotify.RemoteControlBridge (0 results for "Spotify.RemoteControlBridge" on google) and there isn't any thing in the documentation of the different apis even close to controling the spotify player in a way similar to this.
Question
How can I control the spotify desktop app from a browser?
Does bop.fm have any special arrangment with spotify and they are using some "secret api"?
Are they exploiting some functionality that I fail to find?
Is it possible to replicate it?
Is it in accordance with the Spotify terms?
Thanks!
You can't control the Spotify Client or Listen to Events the Spotify Web Helper is emitting. Imagine everybody could: every website could potentially play a song without your permission or even know instantly what you are listening to. To prevent this Spotify only allows approved partners to use this feature.
As you figured out the remote-control-bridge provides this functionality. It can communicate with the Spotify Web Helper running on your system, which is secured by an OAuth and a CSRF Token. In the remote-control-bridge you even can see the allowed partners:
Spotify (who knew)
Yahoo
last.fm
coachella.com
bop.fm
sandpit.us
echonest
musixmatch
You can contact them and ask for a partnership. I'm sure they won't bite.
This is actually a little bit documentated on the website of Spotify in the developers section.
I think bop.fm does use their custom Spotify Play Button widget. That makes use of the iframe that you mentioned.
Here you can find the documentation about this functionality of Spotify. You can then modify it to your own needs using Javascript etc.

How to grab user track info through spotify api

I recently just got through the beginning tutorial for creating a web app with the spotify api. https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/tutorial/. The tutorial was great for showing how to authenticate a user with oauth and log in a user.
The problem I am having is with the endpoint. I can't seem to figure out how to change the endpoint so that instead of displaying a users profile, I can see a list of a users track, better yet starred or top 10 tracks.
for a 10,000 view perspective of what I want to build is a app that would allow users to easily log in through their spotify account, take their stared or top tracks and push them to a radio that I am building with an raspberry pi.
I am new to working with the spotify api and working with api's in general so whatever advice would be awesome.
At the moment, there is no way to get the "starred"-playlist. (At least it's not documented)
I don't know what you mean with "Top 10 User tracks", since this doesn't exist as far as I know
To get a list of the account's current playlists, change the URL to:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/users/{user_id}/playlists
With this URL, you will get a list of simple-playlist-objects wrapped inside a paging-object. Now you can select one of the playlists (or loop through them) and fetch its track this way
NOTE:
If you also want to fetch private playlists, make sure you use the scope playlist_read_private

How to lookup Spotify User metadata (playlists, currently playing, etc)

I only see Artist, Album, and Tracks lookups in the docs. I want to display what I'm currently listening to. Is there a way to do this using the API?
https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/lookup/
Spotify does not provide this at this time. You can either get it by turning on last.fm scrobbling or accessing facebook music data.
As Thomas said Spotify does not provide such a feature 'directly'.
But there are some ways to get it work.
You have to me some more sprcific what you want to do. Web/Desktop/App
I wrote a tiny console app using an external dll
"File/Link removed" - send pm for further information!
If this is what you need just message me. It's a rly tiny application just for test purposes! Because I currently develop a overlay.

Territory restrictions and linked tracks in Spotify

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.

Resources