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Ask HN: I'm looking for a Spotify software engineer to speak to

84 points by azeirah 12y ago

Hey HN, I'm the author of a popular music plugin for streamers, http://sourceforge.net/projects/obsmusicstreamd/ My plugin takes the current playing song from several music players, and outputs it to a text file, so it can be shown on a stream. Spotify's most recent update broke compatibility with the plugin however, and now I'm being flooded with emails :( Previously, it looked through all Windows using the win32api, and looked for windows with "Spotify - " in their title. Spotify's most recent update replaced the title with "Spotify Premium" however. And now I'm at a loss, I've tried contacting their support to connect me to an engineer, but they didn't want to. I've looked through Spotify's Appdata/local and Appdata/roaming folders, but found nothing I could potentially scrape to get the currently playing song. So now, I'm looking for either someone with a lot of experience with Spotify who can help me out, or a Spotify engineer with inside knowledge...

gargarplex 12y ago
You should ask support to escalate your request. To someone in marketing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
spike021 12y ago
Non-premium users, like myself, have a window called 'Spotify Free' - at least on OSX. Might want to look into that on Windows.
jasonhansel 12y ago
If I remember correctly, the Spotify app creates a local web server with an API that can be used to grab the currently playing song, among many other things. See: - https://medium.com/@b3ngr33ni3r/hijacking-spotify-web-control-5014b0a1a360 https://medium.com/@b3ngr33ni3r/hijacking-spotify-web-contro... - http://cgbystrom.com/articles/deconstructing-spotifys-builtin-http-server/ http://cgbystrom.com/articles/deconstructing-spotifys-builti... - https://code.google.com/p/spotify-local-api/ https://code.google.com/p/spotify-local-api/
- azeirah 12y ago
  I'm definitely taking a look at these, they look very promising. Thanks
- Implicated 12y ago
  Best case scenario just happened. Gotta love that.
umanwizard 12y ago
Have you considered the possibility that someone could get fired for helping you with this? If they didn't want to help you when you went through official channels, it would look really bad if some random engineer gave you inside information about how their proprietary software works behind his management chain's back. (And it's telling that you want to talk directly to an engineer, rather than someone who would actually have the authority to grant your request). Looks like you might have to just use good ol' reverse engineering... (As an aside, I'm amazed Spotify doesn't provide an API for this.)
- spike021 12y ago
  It does on Macs using NSDistributedNotificationCenter. Not sure if there's an equivalent for that on Windows though.
- azeirah 12y ago
  No, as a matter of fact, I did not consider that, I'm glad you're pointing that out.
- AYBABTME 12y ago
  If Spotify fires one of their engineers for helping a third party dev on the weekend, that'd be pretty disgusting... there's plenty ways someone could help OP without revealing IP. If an hypothetical engineer gets fired for revealing IP, then the onus is on the engineer to not reveal IP. Not on OP for asking help. This whole idea of not asking someone a question in case they would answer and be put in some Kafkaesque corporate politics nightmare sounds insane to me. How is this scenario what comes first to your mind?
  - umanwizard 12y ago
    It came to my mind first because I'm at a huge company (read: a high value target for corporate espionage) and it's drilled into our heads from day 1 that answering questions about our business (let alone the architecture of our code!) from outsiders is a very serious breach of policy... the mandated behavior is to reroute them to customer service. You are welcome to think my company is just dysfunctional but I think it's a reasonable enough concern to at least be worth bearing in mind -- and the OP responded to my post agreeing with that sentiment. It's a bit naive to simply say "the onus is on the engineer", as if no engineer could be tricked by social engineering into seriously breaching policy.
whitehat2k9 12y ago
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but couldn't you just update it to look for the new title string?
- azeirah 12y ago
  The point is that the newest update -doesn't have- the song in its title unfortunately... http://i.imgur.com/nPoKDOR.png http://i.imgur.com/nPoKDOR.png
leoh 12y ago
I am not a Windows user... but if I were doing this on OS X or Linux, one could look through memory or look at open sockets, though these operations require special permissions.
niftylettuce 12y ago
@azeirah Just talk to this dude he helped me when I had questions in the past. gh: <https://github.com/thelinmichael https://github.com/thelinmichael email: <thelinmichael@gmail.com>
ivraatiems 12y ago
Spotify's most recent update has ruined a lot of things for a lot of people - you're not alone. I've had repeated conversations with Spotify Support about the various things the update destroys, and they have made it clear they will not escalate any requests in a way that involves letting me (or anyone, presumably) speak with an actaul developer - though they will say they've "forward[ed] your ideas to the dev team" if you complain enough. Sorry :(
- endianswap 12y ago
  Yeah, similar frustrating experiences here led me to cancel my spotify premium subscription today and try Google play music, which apparently has all but one of the albums I regularly listen to. Normally that'd bother me but Google lets you upload your own songs and they're treated like first class songs, so I'm super happy with my choice.
  - adyus 12y ago
    Caveat emptor. There's no native desktop apps for Google Music, nor do they have an API for future integrations. On OS X, give Radiant Player a try. I tried switching to Spotify but had a hard time moving playlists. More than half my songs were not found on Spotify.
- mfrieswyk 12y ago
  I'm sure the support agents you've been speaking to are just saying what they've been asked to say. Let's not kill the messenger here. This is likely a decision that is way above theirs and most of their developers' pay grades unfortunately.
  - ivraatiems 12y ago
    Oh, yes, absolutely, and I treat them with politeness. However, the fact there's no transparent procedure to escalate to anywhere above the regular support staff (even to a support supervisor) is indicative of Spotify's overall disinterest in caring for its customers.
- 12y ago
edcastro 12y ago
If everything else fails, maybe add support to last.fm? This way the user could just scrobble directly from Spotify to Last.fm and you get the song from there.
gyaresu 12y ago
Last.fm still continues to scrobble because it's a preferences setting not a client plugin(?) But the Last.fm plugin no longer works: https://open.spotify.com/app/lastfm https://open.spotify.com/app/lastfm
- benbristow 12y ago
  That hasn't worked for a while. Was never very good anyway.
  - disposition2 12y ago
    I disagree, it was one of the few was to _discover_ music in the Spotify desktop app (with Mobile or Web, you are just SOL). I'm actually working on a webapp for personal use (integrating lastfm) to have some modicum of discovery with spotify. Their internal 'discovery' tools, much like their radio is for lack of a better work terrible.
joshmn 12y ago
Have you thought about loading up an MITM proxy and seeing what's being routed where and why? That might lead you to a fist-pump or two ;)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
LukeWalsh 12y ago
Also if a spotify engineer is reading this email me I have some UI mocks for a few UX fixes in the mac desktop app
Shebanator 12y ago
Try searching linkedin - its not that hard to find spotify engineering execs on there.
auganov 12y ago
Use a good old hex editor? Maybe one of the locations is stable enough. I took a quick look at the dump and it doesn't look too hard. Interestingly the js and css is not obfuscated.
johnnybravooo 12y ago
Just capture the title from another source. Spotify is compatible with libre.fm, which is open source.
johnnybravooo 12y ago
Just capture the title from another source instead of the title bar. Spotify is compatible with libre.fm, which is open source. I would use that.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

84 points by azeirah 12y ago

gargarplex 12y ago

You should ask support to escalate your request. To someone in marketing.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

spike021 12y ago

Non-premium users, like myself, have a window called 'Spotify Free' - at least on OSX. Might want to look into that on Windows.

jasonhansel 12y ago

If I remember correctly, the Spotify app creates a local web server with an API that can be used to grab the currently playing song, among many other things. See: - https://medium.com/@b3ngr33ni3r/hijacking-spotify-web-control-5014b0a1a360 https://medium.com/@b3ngr33ni3r/hijacking-spotify-web-contro... - http://cgbystrom.com/articles/deconstructing-spotifys-builtin-http-server/ http://cgbystrom.com/articles/deconstructing-spotifys-builti... - https://code.google.com/p/spotify-local-api/ https://code.google.com/p/spotify-local-api/

azeirah 12y ago
I'm definitely taking a look at these, they look very promising. Thanks
Implicated 12y ago
Best case scenario just happened. Gotta love that.

umanwizard 12y ago

Have you considered the possibility that someone could get fired for helping you with this? If they didn't want to help you when you went through official channels, it would look really bad if some random engineer gave you inside information about how their proprietary software works behind his management chain's back. (And it's telling that you want to talk directly to an engineer, rather than someone who would actually have the authority to grant your request). Looks like you might have to just use good ol' reverse engineering... (As an aside, I'm amazed Spotify doesn't provide an API for this.)

spike021 12y ago
It does on Macs using NSDistributedNotificationCenter. Not sure if there's an equivalent for that on Windows though.
azeirah 12y ago
No, as a matter of fact, I did not consider that, I'm glad you're pointing that out.
AYBABTME 12y ago
If Spotify fires one of their engineers for helping a third party dev on the weekend, that'd be pretty disgusting... there's plenty ways someone could help OP without revealing IP. If an hypothetical engineer gets fired for revealing IP, then the onus is on the engineer to not reveal IP. Not on OP for asking help. This whole idea of not asking someone a question in case they would answer and be put in some Kafkaesque corporate politics nightmare sounds insane to me. How is this scenario what comes first to your mind?
- umanwizard 12y ago
  It came to my mind first because I'm at a huge company (read: a high value target for corporate espionage) and it's drilled into our heads from day 1 that answering questions about our business (let alone the architecture of our code!) from outsiders is a very serious breach of policy... the mandated behavior is to reroute them to customer service. You are welcome to think my company is just dysfunctional but I think it's a reasonable enough concern to at least be worth bearing in mind -- and the OP responded to my post agreeing with that sentiment. It's a bit naive to simply say "the onus is on the engineer", as if no engineer could be tricked by social engineering into seriously breaching policy.

whitehat2k9 12y ago

Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but couldn't you just update it to look for the new title string?

azeirah 12y ago
The point is that the newest update -doesn't have- the song in its title unfortunately... http://i.imgur.com/nPoKDOR.png http://i.imgur.com/nPoKDOR.png

leoh 12y ago

I am not a Windows user... but if I were doing this on OS X or Linux, one could look through memory or look at open sockets, though these operations require special permissions.

niftylettuce 12y ago

@azeirah Just talk to this dude he helped me when I had questions in the past. gh: <https://github.com/thelinmichael https://github.com/thelinmichael email: <thelinmichael@gmail.com>

ivraatiems 12y ago

Spotify's most recent update has ruined a lot of things for a lot of people - you're not alone. I've had repeated conversations with Spotify Support about the various things the update destroys, and they have made it clear they will not escalate any requests in a way that involves letting me (or anyone, presumably) speak with an actaul developer - though they will say they've "forward[ed] your ideas to the dev team" if you complain enough. Sorry :(

endianswap 12y ago
Yeah, similar frustrating experiences here led me to cancel my spotify premium subscription today and try Google play music, which apparently has all but one of the albums I regularly listen to. Normally that'd bother me but Google lets you upload your own songs and they're treated like first class songs, so I'm super happy with my choice.
- adyus 12y ago
  Caveat emptor. There's no native desktop apps for Google Music, nor do they have an API for future integrations. On OS X, give Radiant Player a try. I tried switching to Spotify but had a hard time moving playlists. More than half my songs were not found on Spotify.
mfrieswyk 12y ago
I'm sure the support agents you've been speaking to are just saying what they've been asked to say. Let's not kill the messenger here. This is likely a decision that is way above theirs and most of their developers' pay grades unfortunately.
- ivraatiems 12y ago
  Oh, yes, absolutely, and I treat them with politeness. However, the fact there's no transparent procedure to escalate to anywhere above the regular support staff (even to a support supervisor) is indicative of Spotify's overall disinterest in caring for its customers.
12y ago

edcastro 12y ago

If everything else fails, maybe add support to last.fm? This way the user could just scrobble directly from Spotify to Last.fm and you get the song from there.

gyaresu 12y ago

Last.fm still continues to scrobble because it's a preferences setting not a client plugin(?) But the Last.fm plugin no longer works: https://open.spotify.com/app/lastfm https://open.spotify.com/app/lastfm

benbristow 12y ago
That hasn't worked for a while. Was never very good anyway.
- disposition2 12y ago
  I disagree, it was one of the few was to _discover_ music in the Spotify desktop app (with Mobile or Web, you are just SOL). I'm actually working on a webapp for personal use (integrating lastfm) to have some modicum of discovery with spotify. Their internal 'discovery' tools, much like their radio is for lack of a better work terrible.

joshmn 12y ago

Have you thought about loading up an MITM proxy and seeing what's being routed where and why? That might lead you to a fist-pump or two ;)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

LukeWalsh 12y ago

Also if a spotify engineer is reading this email me I have some UI mocks for a few UX fixes in the mac desktop app

Shebanator 12y ago

Try searching linkedin - its not that hard to find spotify engineering execs on there.

auganov 12y ago

Use a good old hex editor? Maybe one of the locations is stable enough. I took a quick look at the dump and it doesn't look too hard. Interestingly the js and css is not obfuscated.

johnnybravooo 12y ago

Just capture the title from another source. Spotify is compatible with libre.fm, which is open source.

johnnybravooo 12y ago

Just capture the title from another source instead of the title bar. Spotify is compatible with libre.fm, which is open source. I would use that.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]