7 ms·

Say Hello to Our New Web API

113 points by Fogh 12y ago

andyhmltn 12y ago
Brilliant! I've been wanting to access my own playlists through an API for a while to back them up
- jal278 12y ago
  Just hacked this together: http://joellehman.com/playlist/ http://joellehman.com/playlist/ Which should let you download you playlist in CSV
  - andyhmltn 12y ago
    Wow that's awesome. I've needed this for ages
x3ro 12y ago
It doesn't seem possible to delete a playlist or remove tracks from one :( Other than that it's pretty great, maybe I can automate my playlist management now :)
- adamcik 12y ago
  Same conclusion we also had in https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139 https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139 when looking at if we should move away from libspotify in favor of the new web API. For now I would stick with libspotify wrappers until a more complete version of the API comes out.
joshstrange 12y ago
> With a user’s permission, developers can now access user profile information including playlists, This is awesome news! The last time I tried to write something for Spotify to front-load my last.fm (I know I'm late to the game) account but couldn't get access to the playlists. Going to have to check this out when I get some time.
gbrhaz 12y ago
I had a quick look, but to play a track, all I can see is a 30 second preview. Am I missing something, or can you not get the track data from this API? > EDIT: Should've read the first subtitle... "Our Web API lets your applications fetch data from the Spotify music catalog and manage user’s playlists."
- mox1 12y ago
  I doubt they are going to let you actually stream music through this, that would be super useful though..
- adamcik 12y ago
  Streaming is only available through libspotify or the beta SDK on IOS. Rumors from #spotify on freenode indicate that the SDK for other platforms is still being worked on. But once it ships it will provide a minimal lib for streaming and the web API will do everything else.
eli 12y ago
Is there an (easy to use) Spotify plugin to let my office-mates vote on or suggest songs to play next? I know there are some hacky solutions, but this new Web API seems like it should make that a lot easier.
- thejosh 12y ago
  This would be freaking awesome, right now we just use a playlist. Having an office jukebox powered by Spotify would be awesome, and a great usecase. "VoteSpotify" or something :).
- akx 12y ago
  We've been using the Soundrop app inside Spotify with a shared room for that. http://soundrop.fm/ http://soundrop.fm/
- houli 12y ago
  http://soundrop.fm http://soundrop.fm or http://spartify.com http://spartify.com
- jeffasinger 12y ago
  letsparty.fm is something we made, but it's based on rdio, not spotify, since they have easier API access.
  - jeffasinger 12y ago
    This web API doesn't come close to helping with this problem, as it doesn't allow you to play entire songs, or know when the current song is over. Realized I didn't make it a link. http://letsparty.fm http://letsparty.fm
- kingosticks 12y ago
  You might find this Spotify jukebox project interesting https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player
imdsm 12y ago
Insane. I was speaking about Spotify API about an hour ago on IRC, Google'd around, found this, disregarded it (how new can it be?) and now it's at the top of HN. This keeps happening to me, with docker release, with deis, with vagrant, so many things I talk about and then I look at hn and they're there, just waiting for me. This happens so often, we all say here to check HN after we discuss something, because there will no doubt be a link ready for us. Starting to wonder if this is actually just a news feed where you see what you need to see.
- coob 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequency_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequ...
Soarez 12y ago
There's already a node module https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api No code of course, just name-hoarding. FOSS can be really ugly sometimes.
- secondreality 12y ago
  Since I've already made one and it's ready for use, I feel I need to piggyback on your comment to mention it. https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node
kenver 12y ago
I really like Spotify and I love that they're making this API available. But we just saw netflix shutting down their API. Are Spotify committed to keeping this around, or will they just shut it off in a few months when it becomes too much of a pain to manage?
- thathonkey 12y ago
  I think they hope the API will be used to drive subscriptions to their service. If that ends up being the case, they'll probably keep it around. Of course, nobody can look into the future and see what will happen. Building a business around a public API like this would probably not be a smart move... yet.
m_gloeckl 12y ago
This sounds great, indeed. With a listening history on last.fm that reaches back to early 2009, I always thought it would be great to have a service to use the last.fm data to build dynamic playlists for spotify.
- adamcik 12y ago
  Populate a http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html with the listening history and you can use it for dynamic playlisting using the spotify catalog. That is as long as echonest matches the song metadata to an id. http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/ http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/ linked from the demos shows this for artists as a seed, but tasteprofiles as the station seed works nicely as well :-)
  - m_gloeckl 12y ago
    Wow, that looks great. Thanks for the link!
nsxwolf 12y ago
I wonder how long this will last.
- ivraatiems 12y ago
  Probably just long enough for them to make a too-polite-to-be-ironic "thank you for using our development environment" blog post where they shut it down and shunt what's left to a private API for the apps they're currently trying to acquire.
drsounds 12y ago
My boss let me spend this workday with studying the new api
- OutThisLife 12y ago
  "let"
mox1 12y ago
Just as an FYI to everyone, Spotify does not allow any "commercialization" of their APi's / Platform. (Learned this the hard way when I released my Spotify app for $.99 on the app store). https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/ https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/
joshvm 12y ago
Would it kill them to fix some of the bugs in the desktop application first? You can't even sort search results any more. This is apparently marked as a "not now" concern. A lot of premium customers are deeply unsatisfied with the way Spotify handled their latest update.
jerhinesmith 12y ago
What I'd really love (and have looked for in the past) is a way to automatically push a song over to a specific spotify playlist every time I tag a song on shazam (thinking like an IFTTT recipe). It looks like that might be possible with this new api.
- jeffasinger 12y ago
  Soundhound has a button to search on spotify after finding a song. It's a bunch of clicks, but that's what I do now.
instanttaylor 12y ago
I was hoping they'd have a Radio API so Sonos and others could make a better all around experience. Maybe I missed it... or maybe it doesn't exist.
Kiro 12y ago
Can you access the API without authenticating? I just want some basic song info, not play anything.
- thathonkey 12y ago
  You could have spent the 5 minutes on their website that I did to find the endpoint reference which shows that yes, you can get to quite a bit of the API without authenticating: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/ https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/
thesimon 12y ago
Still no access to the current playing track which means I have to continue using last.fm which feels a bit hacky :/
- relaytheurgency 12y ago
  Any idea why they don't allow this? There are a lot of cool possibilities that could arise from that info.
- nuclear_eclipse 12y ago
  You can get that via dbus from the machine running Spotify. Check out my spotify-gnome wrapper script at https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome Basically, you write a simple dbus app that listens for the appropriate song-changed signals from Spotify, and then do with that as you wish. This might not be as easy on Mac or Windows though, as I've only ever used it on Linux.
joshmn 12y ago
Personally this is great timing for some of the features I'm needing to develop http://Listen2EDM.com http://Listen2EDM.com further. I'm sure that music discovery, and the music community in general, will greatly benefit from this!
guilhermesad 12y ago
I've just pushed a ruby wrapper for it: https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify Any contributions would be very welcomed!

113 points by Fogh 12y ago

andyhmltn 12y ago

Brilliant! I've been wanting to access my own playlists through an API for a while to back them up

jal278 12y ago
Just hacked this together: http://joellehman.com/playlist/ http://joellehman.com/playlist/ Which should let you download you playlist in CSV
- andyhmltn 12y ago
  Wow that's awesome. I've needed this for ages

x3ro 12y ago

It doesn't seem possible to delete a playlist or remove tracks from one :( Other than that it's pretty great, maybe I can automate my playlist management now :)

adamcik 12y ago
Same conclusion we also had in https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139 https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139 when looking at if we should move away from libspotify in favor of the new web API. For now I would stick with libspotify wrappers until a more complete version of the API comes out.

joshstrange 12y ago

> With a user’s permission, developers can now access user profile information including playlists, This is awesome news! The last time I tried to write something for Spotify to front-load my last.fm (I know I'm late to the game) account but couldn't get access to the playlists. Going to have to check this out when I get some time.

gbrhaz 12y ago

I had a quick look, but to play a track, all I can see is a 30 second preview. Am I missing something, or can you not get the track data from this API? > EDIT: Should've read the first subtitle... "Our Web API lets your applications fetch data from the Spotify music catalog and manage user’s playlists."

mox1 12y ago
I doubt they are going to let you actually stream music through this, that would be super useful though..
adamcik 12y ago
Streaming is only available through libspotify or the beta SDK on IOS. Rumors from #spotify on freenode indicate that the SDK for other platforms is still being worked on. But once it ships it will provide a minimal lib for streaming and the web API will do everything else.

eli 12y ago

Is there an (easy to use) Spotify plugin to let my office-mates vote on or suggest songs to play next? I know there are some hacky solutions, but this new Web API seems like it should make that a lot easier.

thejosh 12y ago
This would be freaking awesome, right now we just use a playlist. Having an office jukebox powered by Spotify would be awesome, and a great usecase. "VoteSpotify" or something :).
akx 12y ago
We've been using the Soundrop app inside Spotify with a shared room for that. http://soundrop.fm/ http://soundrop.fm/
houli 12y ago
http://soundrop.fm http://soundrop.fm or http://spartify.com http://spartify.com
jeffasinger 12y ago
letsparty.fm is something we made, but it's based on rdio, not spotify, since they have easier API access.
- jeffasinger 12y ago
  This web API doesn't come close to helping with this problem, as it doesn't allow you to play entire songs, or know when the current song is over. Realized I didn't make it a link. http://letsparty.fm http://letsparty.fm
kingosticks 12y ago
You might find this Spotify jukebox project interesting https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player https://github.com/samcreate/Apollo-Player

imdsm 12y ago

Insane. I was speaking about Spotify API about an hour ago on IRC, Google'd around, found this, disregarded it (how new can it be?) and now it's at the top of HN. This keeps happening to me, with docker release, with deis, with vagrant, so many things I talk about and then I look at hn and they're there, just waiting for me. This happens so often, we all say here to check HN after we discuss something, because there will no doubt be a link ready for us. Starting to wonder if this is actually just a news feed where you see what you need to see.

coob 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequency_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequ...

Soarez 12y ago

There's already a node module https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api No code of course, just name-hoarding. FOSS can be really ugly sometimes.

secondreality 12y ago
Since I've already made one and it's ready for use, I feel I need to piggyback on your comment to mention it. https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node

kenver 12y ago

I really like Spotify and I love that they're making this API available. But we just saw netflix shutting down their API. Are Spotify committed to keeping this around, or will they just shut it off in a few months when it becomes too much of a pain to manage?

thathonkey 12y ago
I think they hope the API will be used to drive subscriptions to their service. If that ends up being the case, they'll probably keep it around. Of course, nobody can look into the future and see what will happen. Building a business around a public API like this would probably not be a smart move... yet.

m_gloeckl 12y ago

This sounds great, indeed. With a listening history on last.fm that reaches back to early 2009, I always thought it would be great to have a service to use the last.fm data to build dynamic playlists for spotify.

adamcik 12y ago
Populate a http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html with the listening history and you can use it for dynamic playlisting using the spotify catalog. That is as long as echonest matches the song metadata to an id. http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/ http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/ linked from the demos shows this for artists as a seed, but tasteprofiles as the station seed works nicely as well :-)
- m_gloeckl 12y ago
  Wow, that looks great. Thanks for the link!

nsxwolf 12y ago

I wonder how long this will last.

ivraatiems 12y ago
Probably just long enough for them to make a too-polite-to-be-ironic "thank you for using our development environment" blog post where they shut it down and shunt what's left to a private API for the apps they're currently trying to acquire.

drsounds 12y ago

My boss let me spend this workday with studying the new api

OutThisLife 12y ago
"let"

mox1 12y ago

Just as an FYI to everyone, Spotify does not allow any "commercialization" of their APi's / Platform. (Learned this the hard way when I released my Spotify app for $.99 on the app store). https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/ https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/

joshvm 12y ago

Would it kill them to fix some of the bugs in the desktop application first? You can't even sort search results any more. This is apparently marked as a "not now" concern. A lot of premium customers are deeply unsatisfied with the way Spotify handled their latest update.

jerhinesmith 12y ago

What I'd really love (and have looked for in the past) is a way to automatically push a song over to a specific spotify playlist every time I tag a song on shazam (thinking like an IFTTT recipe). It looks like that might be possible with this new api.

jeffasinger 12y ago
Soundhound has a button to search on spotify after finding a song. It's a bunch of clicks, but that's what I do now.

instanttaylor 12y ago

I was hoping they'd have a Radio API so Sonos and others could make a better all around experience. Maybe I missed it... or maybe it doesn't exist.

Kiro 12y ago

Can you access the API without authenticating? I just want some basic song info, not play anything.

thathonkey 12y ago
You could have spent the 5 minutes on their website that I did to find the endpoint reference which shows that yes, you can get to quite a bit of the API without authenticating: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/ https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/

thesimon 12y ago

Still no access to the current playing track which means I have to continue using last.fm which feels a bit hacky :/

relaytheurgency 12y ago
Any idea why they don't allow this? There are a lot of cool possibilities that could arise from that info.
nuclear_eclipse 12y ago
You can get that via dbus from the machine running Spotify. Check out my spotify-gnome wrapper script at https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome Basically, you write a simple dbus app that listens for the appropriate song-changed signals from Spotify, and then do with that as you wish. This might not be as easy on Mac or Windows though, as I've only ever used it on Linux.

joshmn 12y ago

Personally this is great timing for some of the features I'm needing to develop http://Listen2EDM.com http://Listen2EDM.com further. I'm sure that music discovery, and the music community in general, will greatly benefit from this!

guilhermesad 12y ago

I've just pushed a ruby wrapper for it: https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify Any contributions would be very welcomed!