How to Program Spotify!

I have a very particular use case where on my Garmin watch that can have up to 2,000 songs downloaded onto it from Spotify.

Here’s the catch: Syncing that many songs regularly is MASSIVE, and takes forever.

Plus, I usually don’t even get CLOSE to listening to that many songs while running. Maybe like 10-20 AT MOST.

So, here’s the catch: I want to program a playlist or two, that update periodically to my watch, that are just samples of other playlists.

Playlists

• “Random 20” (A playlist of only 20 random songs from my liked songs, that updates once a day)
• “Last 20” (My most recently liked 20 songs, also updated every day)

Spotify API

Spotify has an API that let’s you code your playlists ¹ 😂 (My brother would be teasing me so bad right now)

GitHub

Here is the GitHub repository for this project.

Feel free to clone it and go!!

Walkthrough of the code

So here’s the deal, you could make raw API request to Spotify if you wanted to using any computing language you wanted, but that is quite verbose and unwieldy. There’s a nice python package called Spotipy which lets you do this in python very easily.

Here’s a walkthrough of the code:

• Lines 1-6 are importing our functions and dependencies that we need.
• Line 8 is creating a new Azure Function App instance.
• Line 10 is the way you trigger a run of your function app using cron job notation. Notice the 0 7 * * * means that on the 7th hour of every day I want this to run, which happens to be midnight my local time.
• Lines 12-14, I don’t really know what they are, to be honest; just some boilerplate code I found from Azure Functions.
• Line 16, though, is the way you want to read your Spotify library.
• Line 17 is how I’m getting the ID of the playlist I want to alter as an environment variable. I’ve just saved it in my Azure function as an environment variable.
• Line 18 is making a new Spotipy instance.
• Line 21 is getting the most recently liked songs. By default it gets the last 20 songs, so I don’t have to pass in any number there; it just does 20 by default. I then pull out the names and the ID of each one so that on line 25 I can just replace the playlist I want with those 20 tracks. I then just for loop through each one to print them off so I know which ones actually got transferred over.

Getting a client-id

First you have to get a client-id by registering an app with Spotify. I think you only get one per account unless you pay more or something, but essentially it’s letting the app act on your behalf and alter your Spotify library for you if you allow it (the first time you run the app, it will prompt you to allow the app to alter your Spotify account)

Deployment

This code runs once a day, on an Azure Function in cron-job type fashion

Monitoring

This Azure Function App prints its logs to an Azure Application Insights

Cost breakdown

This only cost $0.05 per MONTH! 😱