At least the TOKEN command was perfect for me, thank you! Instead of passing ID and SECRET, I wrote the values from the Spotify Developer Dashboard to a file like so:
$ touch .spotify_credentials && chmod 600 .spotify_credentials
then edited .spotify_credentials with client_id:client_secret, then
$ curl --basic --user "$(cat .spotify_credentials)" -X POST -d grant_type=client_credentials https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token
which was successful
I'm a user / minor contributor. It could use some polishing, but it gets the job done (JSON or TSV output). I wonder if it could sidestep Spotify restrictions by not providing an explicit interface for uploading playlists to competing services -- just providing the download portion?
This, on top of songs disappearing from my playlists, rendered unavailable.
I organize everything in foobar now, both local music and streaming playlists with the help of extensions. You can add Youtube sources to your playlists. Even if the links break, you can automatically fix them, keep the name and structure. Have not tried the app versions.
Just give me the fucking mp3 or flac files, subscriptions should be advertised as radio, not a music "library". I've been bitching about the industry burning down my shelves for years now... it's unfathomable how much people rely on these stupid streaming services.
That said, I'd still gladly pay for the music discovery, I just have started to feel cheated out of my money over the years doing so. Should I really be paying $10/month to listen to the same songs I listen to every other month. I don't go on a music collection binge all that often you know.
Say, one thing that I really appreciate from Spotify is the weekly playlist. I love discovering music, and it usually has a few songs I end up liking. Does foobar have a module that does recommendations? Or is there a community aggregation-of-playlists out there I could roll my own?
If it helps, in the settings you can enable an option to display songs even when they are unavailable. It's not perfect but I find it much easier to compromise on that as opposed to Youtube's practice of slowly rotting away playlists until all that's left is a mix of [Deleted Video] and [Private Video]
Spotify is so much better than apple music, and this is probably minimal compared to what apple music does to convert/retain users from Spotify.
Think of all the barriers apple music has created (apple watch app for a long time was the only one that supported offline, apple music is preinstalled, when you hit play and no apps are currently playing it will go to apple music, probably much more).
My main thought though is that Spotify is much better anyway, why give people the ability to export their curated playlists and use somewhere else. They’ve built that service that helped you discover all those songs — if you created all those playlists from scratch with no help from Spotify’s algorithm (discover/recommendations) good for you but I doubt that’s most people.
Personally, I want to have a text backup of all my playlists.
If my Spotify disappeared into the aether tomorrow, it would be a lot of pain. Not completely awful -- I follow a lot of my favorite bands on Youtube, and I buy physical releases occasionally too, but my connection to every artist that I can't name off the top of my head will have been lost.
I've been a spotify customer for years and I plan to continue that, but I also am not planning on letting my playlists go silently into the night.
The fact that it may have better features or that other services also have lock-in does not in any way excuse this behavior from Spotify. It's anti-user and they should stop.
I'm one of those speak with my wallet kind of people. So when I seen news of this yesterday I wrote into their support saying I was not pleased with it.
Their response was some random canned response about how you can still export your data. I'm not a fan of lock in, and I'm even less thrilled about not actually responding to my actual questions and instead giving me some canned BS.
I responded back telling them thanks for not even reading my question and responding with a canned response, then asked for instructions on how to delete my account. I haven't heard back. For what it's worth I wasn't rude in any of this, I was straight and to the point, but I was not rude. Now they seem to be simply ignoring me.
I'm definitely not spending my money with this service any more. I used to feel a tiny bit sad for them competing with Apple and their whole complaint against Apple and payment stuff. But after seeing this shitty set of responses from them I just no longer care, it feels like they've brought at least some of this on themselves.
As a sidenote, I'm sort of fed up with customer support in general these days. Snippeted answers are great when they make sense. I.e. a user is asking a simple question, you can take the approach of some personalization sprinkled with snippets to make your life easier and your messaging more consistent. But when you have an unhappy, or upset customer, the last thing you should do is throw in some canned response that doesn't even address their concerns.
...what's the alternative? People hate Google, they hate Amazon... I remember people used to hate Apple Music years ago because it was missing tons of basic functionality.
Is it better? Is Apple Music the "accepted" streaming platform now? Do they all suck in their own way? Or is there another platform that's the good one now?
So the other day Spotify decided to block API access to SongShift [1], which used their API to transfer playlists to other services. By doing that, they removed a method which was valid under GDPR article 20 subsection 2 to transfer personal data directly from one controller to another. FreeYouMusic is using another process without cooperation or consent from Spotify, and doesn't include all personal data.
I've been exchanging emails with Spotify to demand that they re-enable the API or allow for some other method to transfer my personal data directly to another controller. So far they've just sent me boilerplate back telling me about their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process. You can read the full conversation here [2].
I fully intend to file a complaint with the Dutch civil court if they don't allow me to exercise my rights under the law. It would be good to have some precedent here. As they've already shown it to be technically feasible (a requirement of the law), and enabling the process is literally a boolean away, I think such a complaint would have a high chance of success.
Additionally, in my opinion their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process is currently also in violation, because they take up to 30 days (counting 2 now) before emailing you the ZIP with your personal data. This is arguably "undue delay" (which is prohibited under the GDPR). If it comes to a case, removing this delay will certainly be part of the demands.
I have been looking to move away from Spotify for a while now due to their lacklustre support for iOS devices. Is there a good comparison between Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music somewhere, especially in terms of their coverage?
What's lackluster about Spotify on iOS? I use Spotify on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows desktop and they all work pretty well.
> especially in terms of their coverage?
If you are a typical user with typical tastes, they are all more or less the same. If there's something in particular you want - like lossless compression or being able to upload your own music or Grateful Dead concerts - mention it and people may be able to guide you better.
You've mentioned the big three services, but you might want to also consider Google/YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal and I'm sure there are more.
I've been wanting to write about my experiences with the streaming services that I've tried (Spotify, Deezer, AM, YTM, Tidal...) so I guess this seems like a good opportunity. This was a bit long for just a comment so I'm sharing a pastebin.
Well, for what it's worth I've been using YouTube Music for over a year and it's coverage has never disappointed me - even for little-known songs (though that's relative). Just my experience and observation.
There are some problems like this that I’ve ended up solving with a scrolling capture screenshot (ShareX on Windows) and the first fitting google result for an OCR service.
Man I have been using ShareX for quite a while and didn't even realize they had that scrolling capture feature. I just keep finding their tool more and more useful.
I like your approach to getting your playlists out. I just used https://exportify.net/ and it gave me all my playlists in a CSV format with lots of information on each track such as things like genre. I feel like maybe this option may be a bit more useful to you if you want that kind of extra information.
This exact problem has prevented me from creating playlists in the first place. I'm a non-iphone Apple Music user, but the same still applies. I have no playlists because I assume I'll lose all that curation work someday. So, I just don't do it.
I wonder how many others are the same way and how that negatively affects their revenue.
I haven't studied the fine print on this service, but I wonder about the (high?) value of knowing a person's music tastes in this level of detail. I have hundreds of playlists on spotify, and I bet you can state a lot of things about me by knowing what music I like.
Last.fm allows you to track your whole listening history (and you can export it or play with their API). I agree it could be interesting to infer something valuable from what a person likes (musically), but I don't know if there's much to read between the lines other than "if user likes artist X probably will like artist Y". You may infer my location (from local artists listened), and from that paired with timestamps you could tell some of my habits (work, school, commuting). Personal taste can hint an age group and gender as well, but it wouldn't be precise at all. Perhaps mood? I don't see much value on that info, compared to what you can gather from navigation history, messages or other services.
Just a tought I've had but what if it will actually reveal more insights about their recommendation and curation algorithms than about your music taste?
This data would be more interesting over time. What new artists have been added to the playlists and have any new songs from already known artists been missed...
I remember attempting to move over from Spotify to Apple Music in 2017. Used some other apps at that time. Didn’t work so well. So I gave up and used Spotify for a few years. And then switched afresh to Apple Music in 2019.
Today, though, I found freeyourmusic and I was super impressed by their pricing.
Figured I’d give it a shot and I am convinced this is the best $10 I have ever spent!
[+] [-] zoltar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_asdf|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
[+] [-] ebb_earl_co|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdatronics|5 years ago|reply
I'm a user / minor contributor. It could use some polishing, but it gets the job done (JSON or TSV output). I wonder if it could sidestep Spotify restrictions by not providing an explicit interface for uploading playlists to competing services -- just providing the download portion?
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
I organize everything in foobar now, both local music and streaming playlists with the help of extensions. You can add Youtube sources to your playlists. Even if the links break, you can automatically fix them, keep the name and structure. Have not tried the app versions.
[+] [-] nixpulvis|5 years ago|reply
That said, I'd still gladly pay for the music discovery, I just have started to feel cheated out of my money over the years doing so. Should I really be paying $10/month to listen to the same songs I listen to every other month. I don't go on a music collection binge all that often you know.
And then poof, it's gone.
[+] [-] Darkphibre|5 years ago|reply
I still remember being impressed by the preference-clustering paper in '95 (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10...) by an MIT grad for what became Firefly (later purchased by Microsoft solely for their sign-in tech called Passport https://web.archive.org/web/19970116111618/http://www.firefl... , still a bit annoyed they shut it down and let music recommendation languish for another decade).
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pelario|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MildlySerious|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crabtr|5 years ago|reply
It might have been the case that the song didn't disappear, but is instead hidden because it's unavailable.
At the bottom of the preferences window there's a section called "display options." In there enable "show unavailable songs in playlists."
[+] [-] CravingLogic|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/pavel-aicradle/exportify
[+] [-] lambdatronics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harsha930|5 years ago|reply
Think of all the barriers apple music has created (apple watch app for a long time was the only one that supported offline, apple music is preinstalled, when you hit play and no apps are currently playing it will go to apple music, probably much more).
My main thought though is that Spotify is much better anyway, why give people the ability to export their curated playlists and use somewhere else. They’ve built that service that helped you discover all those songs — if you created all those playlists from scratch with no help from Spotify’s algorithm (discover/recommendations) good for you but I doubt that’s most people.
[+] [-] phantomathkg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabroni_salad|5 years ago|reply
If my Spotify disappeared into the aether tomorrow, it would be a lot of pain. Not completely awful -- I follow a lot of my favorite bands on Youtube, and I buy physical releases occasionally too, but my connection to every artist that I can't name off the top of my head will have been lost.
I've been a spotify customer for years and I plan to continue that, but I also am not planning on letting my playlists go silently into the night.
[+] [-] eli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeanofthedead|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hnrobert42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selykg|5 years ago|reply
Their response was some random canned response about how you can still export your data. I'm not a fan of lock in, and I'm even less thrilled about not actually responding to my actual questions and instead giving me some canned BS.
I responded back telling them thanks for not even reading my question and responding with a canned response, then asked for instructions on how to delete my account. I haven't heard back. For what it's worth I wasn't rude in any of this, I was straight and to the point, but I was not rude. Now they seem to be simply ignoring me.
I'm definitely not spending my money with this service any more. I used to feel a tiny bit sad for them competing with Apple and their whole complaint against Apple and payment stuff. But after seeing this shitty set of responses from them I just no longer care, it feels like they've brought at least some of this on themselves.
As a sidenote, I'm sort of fed up with customer support in general these days. Snippeted answers are great when they make sense. I.e. a user is asking a simple question, you can take the approach of some personalization sprinkled with snippets to make your life easier and your messaging more consistent. But when you have an unhappy, or upset customer, the last thing you should do is throw in some canned response that doesn't even address their concerns.
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
...what's the alternative? People hate Google, they hate Amazon... I remember people used to hate Apple Music years ago because it was missing tons of basic functionality.
Is it better? Is Apple Music the "accepted" streaming platform now? Do they all suck in their own way? Or is there another platform that's the good one now?
[+] [-] Confiks|5 years ago|reply
I've been exchanging emails with Spotify to demand that they re-enable the API or allow for some other method to transfer my personal data directly to another controller. So far they've just sent me boilerplate back telling me about their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process. You can read the full conversation here [2].
I fully intend to file a complaint with the Dutch civil court if they don't allow me to exercise my rights under the law. It would be good to have some precedent here. As they've already shown it to be technically feasible (a requirement of the law), and enabling the process is literally a boolean away, I think such a complaint would have a high chance of success.
Additionally, in my opinion their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process is currently also in violation, because they take up to 30 days (counting 2 now) before emailing you the ZIP with your personal data. This is arguably "undue delay" (which is prohibited under the GDPR). If it comes to a case, removing this delay will certainly be part of the demands.
[1] https://songshift.com/blog/spotify_transfers
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
They are open with data, have good API's etc until they get market dominance then they stop supporting many of those same things.
They have dropped their support for Linux Clients, they closed most of their API's, and various other things
It is a repeating pattern with companies that are disrupting a market
[+] [-] m-p-3|5 years ago|reply
https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/
[+] [-] csunbird|5 years ago|reply
https://freeyourmusic.com/en/blog/best-music-streaming-platf...
[+] [-] DangerousPie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|5 years ago|reply
> especially in terms of their coverage?
If you are a typical user with typical tastes, they are all more or less the same. If there's something in particular you want - like lossless compression or being able to upload your own music or Grateful Dead concerts - mention it and people may be able to guide you better.
You've mentioned the big three services, but you might want to also consider Google/YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal and I'm sure there are more.
[+] [-] kekington|5 years ago|reply
https://pastebin.com/KG5huAnn
[+] [-] plibither8|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disgu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InfinityByTen|5 years ago|reply
This is the best of the lot.
[+] [-] tapland|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fogest|5 years ago|reply
I like your approach to getting your playlists out. I just used https://exportify.net/ and it gave me all my playlists in a CSV format with lots of information on each track such as things like genre. I feel like maybe this option may be a bit more useful to you if you want that kind of extra information.
[+] [-] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adnanh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealmarv|5 years ago|reply
ANSWER to myself: Seems there is at least a simple drag&drop solution with the select all on desktop app -> LibreOffice https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-export-my-Spotify-playlist-as...
[+] [-] pensatoio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdatronics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bakerkretzmar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codazoda|5 years ago|reply
I wonder how many others are the same way and how that negatively affects their revenue.
[+] [-] blunte|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimmund|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djeiasbsbo|5 years ago|reply
This data would be more interesting over time. What new artists have been added to the playlists and have any new songs from already known artists been missed...
[+] [-] tareqak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CivBase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafed00d|5 years ago|reply
I remember attempting to move over from Spotify to Apple Music in 2017. Used some other apps at that time. Didn’t work so well. So I gave up and used Spotify for a few years. And then switched afresh to Apple Music in 2019.
Today, though, I found freeyourmusic and I was super impressed by their pricing.
Figured I’d give it a shot and I am convinced this is the best $10 I have ever spent!