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Jelmer Neeven edited this page Mar 24, 2019 · 5 revisions

Using the Windows executables

NOTE: Setting up automatic updates currently involves quite some manual labor. I hope to have the program do this automatically in the future.

Downloading the tool and creating a subscription playlist

  • Download the zip file and extract it to the location you want to install the tool to.
  • Open the extracted SpotifySubscriber folder.
  • Hold shift and press right click on an empty space in the folder, you should see the option "Open PowerShell window here":

powershell

Click this option, and in the window that appears, type the following command:

.\init.exe USERNAME

Where USERNAME should be replaced by your own username, in my case jneeven. It should look something like this: init

This will open your browser and Spotify will ask you to login and give permission for this tool to read and modify your playlists, etc. After you give permission, you will be redirected to http://localhost/?code=SOME_CODE. Do not close the browser window! Instead, copy the URL from the browser and enter it in the PowerShell window.

If everything was successful, you should see the following message:

Creating playlist with name SpotifySubscriber and the following description:
SpotifySubscriber feed. Whenever one of your subscribed playlists changes, the new songs are added to this list.
Successfully initialized SpotifySubscriber for username jneeven. To get started, subscribe to a few playlists with subscribe.py and then periodically run update.py.

If you now open Spotify, you will see that a new playlist was added to your account:

playlist

This is the playlist to which all new tracks from your subscribed playlists will be added.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe to playlists

To subscribe to a playlist, we again use the PowerShell window. You can subscribe to any playlist you currently follow and do not own yourself (you can also subscribe to collaborative playlists you do own yourself, but the subscription feed won't show the tracks you added to this list yourself). Execute the following command:

.\subscribe.exe "PART_OF_PLAYLIST_NAME"

This will subscribe you to all playlists that have this text in their name. For example

.\subscribe.exe "release"

will subscribe to all Release Radar playlists you follow, as well as any other playlists of which the name contains "release".

To unsubscribe from a playlist, we simply add --unsubscribe like this:

.\subscribe.exe --unsubscribe "release"

Which will unsubscribe you from any playlists containing "release".

To now ensure that our subscription feed will be automatically updated, there is one more step we need to take.

(Automatically) updating the subscription feed

To check your subscribed playlists for new songs since you subscribed to them, you can simply double-click update.exe in the SpotifySubcriber folder. However, you don't want to have to do this manually every time. Therefore, it is a good idea to set up a task in the Windows Task Scheduler.

To do so, press windows key + R and type taskschd.msc (alternatively, you can open the search menu and search for "Schedule tasks"). This will open the following window:

scheduler

Press "Create Task...". In the window that pops up, enter any name you like: create_task

Make sure "Configure for" is set to the windows version you're using.

Press the "Triggers" tab and choose the following options: new_trigger

This will make sure that your subscription feed is updated every day at 20:14 (as long as your PC is turned on). Feel free to choose a different time or update frequency here.

Finally, open the "Actions" tab and point it to the location you installed SpotifySubscriber in: new_action

That's it! Your SpotifySubscriber feed will now be updated every day when one of your subscribed playlists changes. You can add or remove subscriptions any time.

Running from source

Before running anything, you need to install the dependencies. SpotifySubscriber has only two: numpy and spotipy. Unfortunately, the version of spotipy provided by pip is outdated, so it needs to be installed from source.

To run the source code yourself, you first need to register a new app in Spotify.

After doing this, create a file called client_data.json in the src folder with the following structure:

{
    "client_secret": "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET",
    "client_id": "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
}

To create a subscription feed, run the following command:

python src/init.py USERNAME

Where USERNAME should be replaced with your own Spotify username. This will open your browser and prompt you to login to the Spotify access terminal. You will then be redirected to a page that cannot be reached (http://localhost/?code=SOME_CODE). You must copy this URL into the terminal from which you executed the script! After entering the URL in the terminal, you should see a message like the following:

Creating playlist with name SpotifySubscriber and the following description:
SpotifySubscriber feed. Whenever one of your subscribed playlists changes, the new songs are added to this list.
Successfully initialized SpotifySubscriber for username jneeven. To get started, subscribe to a few playlists with subscribe.py and then periodically run update.py.

Subscribing to and unsubscribing from playlists

After creating a subscription feed, you can subscribe to a playlist with the following command:

python src/subscribe.py "PART_OF_PLAYLIST_NAME"

Where PART_OF_PLAYLIST_NAME is the (part) of the playlist name you want to subscribe to. Note: you can only subscribe to playlist that you actually follow on Spotify. For example:

python src/subscribe.py "release"

will subscribe to all followed playlists with 'release' in their name, for example the Release Radar.

To unsubscribe from a playlist, simply run the same command with the --unsubscribe option:

python src/subscribe.py --unsubscribe "PART_OF_PLAYLIST_NAME"

Updating the feed

To update the subscription feed (i.e. check for new tracks in your subscribed playlists), simply run the following command:

python src/update.py

Since you don't want to have to do this manually every time, I suggest creating a task for it in the Task Scheduler (Windows) or creating a crontab scheduled task for it (Linux). For more information about scheduling the updater as a Windows task, check (Automatically) updating the subscription feed.

Roadmap

There are many improvements that need to be made:

  • The Windows executables should be tested on different devices.
  • A GUI is necessary, because using three python scripts / executables is cumbersome.
  • Instead of having to schedule the update task manually, the code should register this task itself.
  • Before adding new songs to the subscription feed, they should be compared to the feed history such that a song will never appear in the subscription feed twice. Currently, update_feed only filters duplicate tracks within the same update.
  • Extending on the above, the feed could also filter songs that are already in any of the user's playlists or song library.
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