tinyspotifyr

Overview

tinyspotifyr is an R wrapper for the Spotify’s Web API. It is a fork of spotifyr by Charlie Thompson, since revived at its current location, with minimal dependencies inspired by the tinyverse. The focus of this package is to mirror the spotify api in R.

Installation

R version 3.2.0 (recommended)

install.packages('tinyspotifyr')

Development version

devtools::install_github('troyhernandez/tinyspotifyr')

Authentication

First, set up a Dev account with Spotify to access their Web API here. This will give you your Client ID and Client Secret. Once you have those, you can pull your access token into R with get_spotify_access_token().

The easiest way to authenticate is to set your credentials to the System Environment variables SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID and SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET. The default arguments to get_spotify_access_token() (and all other functions in this package) will refer to those. Alternatively, you can set them manually and make sure to explicitly refer to your access token in each subsequent function call.

Sys.setenv(SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')
Sys.setenv(SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')

access_token <- get_spotify_access_token()

Authorization code flow

For certain functions and applications, you’ll need to log in as a Spotify user. To do this, your Spotify Developer application needs to have a callback url. You can set this to whatever you want that will work with your application, but a good default option is http://localhost:1410/ (see image below). For more information on authorization, visit the offical Spotify Developer Guide.

Usage

Create a Daily Radio playlist

library(tinyspotifyr)
playlist_name <- "Daily Radio"

Get your playlists

my_playlists <- get_my_playlists(limit = 50)

Create a new playlist

Find yesterday’s Daily Radio playlist or create a new, empty playlist.

playlist_logical <- (my_playlists$name == playlist_name)
if(sum(playlist_logical) > 0){
  ind <- which(playlist_logical)
  dr <- my_playlists[ind, ]
} else {
  dr <- create_playlist("TroyHernandez", playlist_name, public = FALSE)
}

Add songs to playlist

I use my Discover Weekly playlist as a base and overwrite my existing “Daily Radio” tracks. Using reorder_replace_playlist_items is more robust for playlists than other options.

discover_weekly <- my_playlists[which(my_playlists$name == "Discover Weekly"),]
dw_tracks <- get_playlist_tracks(discover_weekly$id)
dw_uri <- dw_tracks$track.uri
reorder_replace_playlist_items(playlist_id = dr$id, uris = dw_uri)

Add podcasts to your playlist

I listen to 4 songs between each podcast. NPR updates every hour, but sometimes it’s empty and returns an error. Notice the zero indexing.

# Add NPR
try(add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:6BRSvIBNQnB68GuoXJRCnQ", position = 0), silent = TRUE)
# Add WBEZ
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:1x1n9iWJLYNXYdDgLk5yQu", position = 1)
# CBS
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:2pLChHUBuwElfAplwVGTdF", position = 6)
# JRE Clips
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:1LMmQF9PH8LjYrktU0Oq5Y", position = 7)
# Chicago Tribune
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:3K1ffPI9ynW3mO24A5rfbF", position = 12)
# Marketplace
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:6zYlX5UGEPmNCWacYUJQGD", position = 13)
# Crains
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:20Ut1ENH9nTy4LqWF9p8vq", position = 18)
# Planet Money
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:4FYpq3lSeQMAhqNI81O0Cn", position = 23)
# WSJ Tech
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:51MrXc7hJQBE2WJf2g4aWN", position = 28)
# Useful idiots
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:5BpYXlVorOw5FZ9pfpu7ff", position = 33)
# Chicago Tonight to the end of the podcast
add_latest_to_playlist(playlist_id = dr$id, uri = "spotify:show:2WuB3zkmXGo7sJUZ6GQIx3")

I run this as a cron job every morning with some extra tweaks.