API out soon or do we create our own ugly hacks?

Have you tried scrobblify? (works with windows and wine)
http://code.google.com/p/scrobblify/ ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

No... I use OS X, so not a lot of luck there... but thanks for the link anyway! ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Spotify has a last.fm function if you check your settings. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

In the absence of an official API, I've gone ahead and made a really nasty hack.
AppleScript tells Spotify to quit or start playing a song (based on whether it's running or not), and on my Mac Mini (which I use for HTPC purposes with Plex) the pre-selected playlist is one called Plex. It's randomized etc, of course, and here's the cool thing.

The Plex helper daemon only looks for the application it launched from within Plex (i.e., the AppleScript). It's not aware that Spotify launches in the background, so Plex starts running fullscreen again as soon as Spotify starts playing (or quits), because the AppleScript terminates.

This means that after a short while, the Plex screensaver kicks in, and the music is still on.
Song changes are announced via Growl, and still works fine.

I do wish the API were out though, because it would be sweet to be able to query and control Spotify directly instead of relying on silly hacks ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

@Oscar Rylin: would you mind sharing your AppleScript hacks with us? I'm trying to write a plugin for Xchat but I'm not getting very far. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I strongly doubt that's going to happen (as in "never", even though never is a pretty long time).

First and foremost, you'd need to be able to play the encrypted music files.
I seriously doubt Spotify will just hand out the decryption key, as it's most likely an integral part of the licensing agreement with the studios to guarantee future income -- otherwise there's nothing stopping you from simply downloading one of the biggest music libraries in the world for your own purposes.

You'd also be able to kill the ads, robbing Spotify of one of their income sources.

Why, exactly would they want anyone to write a third-party client, when their business revolves around their own client and clever techniques?
(Hint, have a look at the console output and look at when and how it does things)

I'd be very happy if the API gave me access to the actual decrypted audio stream (meaning I could play the Audio on platforms not supported by Spotify), but I'd definitely be OK with having to have Spotify be responsible for playing the stream if that's the only option.

As for what the API will allow for, well, that's up to Spotify.
I'm assuming the first version of the API will be basic read/write communications with the player, allowing us to integrate Spotify into other products (namely things like XBMC, Boxee etc).

The second iteration might very well be to extend Spotify with plugins.
I could easily see plugins being made with quicklinks to the artists' websites, street teams and other easily accessible information.

Modifying the ad-stream? Nope. Reading the unencrypted audio stream? Nope.
Writing an equalizer? Sure, so long as you know that it'll be Spotify applying it to the audio streams (i.e., you don't get to touch the actual audio streams at all, but you might be able to write filters for it).

Modifying the appearance of the client?
Sure (/Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Resources).

If all you want to do is change the colors, you could probably apply a CoreGraphics filter to the application (or the equivalent on the lesser platforms).

Basically, in the long run, the API will probably allow you to do anything except mess with their revenue stream. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Ok.. I admit that I haven't really looked into how the streaming is done in Spotify. But why would the music stream be encrypted? There is no meaning in hiding the stream from others since it don't contain any vital personal data, and if they are afraid of the stream getting it ripped or edited it wont help since the music will pass unencrypted through the audio device at some point. And I guess that the ads are part of the stream, so those would come anyway (even though it would be possible to make some kind of stream analyzer that stopped the stream when a ad starts.)

The main reason that I want a server API is for making client on other platforms. I'm using and programing on Amiga as a hobby, and I would like a native client to both AmigaOS4.1 on my AmigaOne and AmigaOS3.9 on my Amiga1200.

For the moment I'm reading the sound stream from the sound device on my linux computer where I'm running spotify with wine. The program I have written sets up a socket against another program that I run on the Amiga1200 and the send the sounddata it reads from the sound device from the linux computer to the amiga. This works really fine, and if I had a client API I guess I could have changed track and so on from the Amiga.

So the part of not being able to read the unencrypted sound stream is already not true, since I'm able to do this. :)

This solution force me to use my own computer as a relay server that alway have to be on... and this is one of the things I want to avoid. Otherwise I could just set up my own streaming server from my own music archive instead of using spotify (Since the music I listen to on spotify is the same as the one I have in my own music archive...). ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

It's not so much making it impossible to rip the Spotify collection as making it infeasible.
The actual cached songs are stored encrypted on disk to make sure everyone and their grandma don't just copy the songs to their iPods, sharing the music with others etc. -- especially now that during the past month or so, there's been a fair bit of exclusive content on Spotify.

Of course you can read the actual stream as sent from the soundcard, but it includes system sound and sound from other apps as well, making it very time consuming to rip the 2088985 songs currently in Spotify's index.

Under OS X you can limit stream rippers to only grab the sound for various apps, and I'm confident some of the sound frameworks available for the various Linux distros can do it as well, so fair enough -- it can be ripped at 1:1, but you end up with a higher bitrate file (i.e uncompressed audio based on already compressed Vorbis audio). Compressing that again wouldn't be too nice ;)

Of course, the EULA (whether or not it's a legal document is a wholly different discussion) states (or did, in closed beta atleast) that we're not allowed to use stream rippers, disassemble the code etc.

I totally understand the purpose and idea behind what you want to do though, but I just don't see Spotify favoring the hacker community over the music label contract they're working so hard to get, as ultimately, 95% of the users won't give a good god damn about plugins or other ways to use Spotify.

There was a person a while ago who wanted Spotify to port the app to the original Xbox so he could use it in XBMC, refusing to listen to reason (i.e., why would Spotify pay for an SDK for an EOL platform, where the only potential users have proven themselves to in most cases not care about copyright -- though there are still those who only use it for strictly legal purposes).

In other words, there's a lot of people asking similar questions, so I guess I just expect the worst whenever I see one :-P

There is a possibility that Spotify could release a small player-only app which takes the encrypted files and plays them, with ads intact), but that means a minimal codebase, making it very dificult to hide the decryption key, defeating the entire purpose ;)

Personally, I always have at least one computer on (in this case my iMac), hooked up to way too much storage, serving Plex (fork of XBMC for OS X).
While I can control Spotify to some degree unofficially with AppleScript, it would be more productive to have read/write access to parts of the application (i.e., read and write playlists, do searches, play/pause, next song, change playlist etc.).

Ideally exposed as a webservice, making it platform agnostic (Spotify remote on the iPhone? No probs. Spotify controller on the XBOX? Sure, so long as you write a XBMC plugin or a dedicated app with an unlicensed, EOL SDK ;) )

The best thing you can do is sign up for the mailinglist Andreas Ehn mentioned and wait for it to launch. I think it's pretty safe to say that they'll be listening to our input from a beta API access, and you're not alone in wanting to be able to handle the actual audiostream -- it's just that the majority are more interested in being able to integrate it with current products (Last.fm scrobblers, MediaCenter-like products as different in-software interfaces etc.), and it would increase the big S' marketshare.

In other words, so long as people remember that Spotify is a for-profit entity, it's somewhat possible to figure out what the future might hold in store for us. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Aha.. I see... I haven't realized that spotify actually cache the song locally on the computer (I probably would have known this if I looked in the configuration menu earlier... did that just now :) ). That sets the whole thing in another perspective. Of course they don't want people to be able to play the files right from the computer.

Well I guess I'll just have to settle with improving my stream relay then. As I wrote earlier. If they give us a client control API it will not be any problem for me to remote control the spotify client on the linux computer from the stream reader on the other computer. :) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Oh... I didn't control read my comment. I don't use wine, I use VMware. VMware uses the /dev/dsp device in linux and I just open the /dev/dsp and read the raw datastream.

I tried with wine at first... but it seems like wine don't use the dsp device. So I don't really understand how Wine plays the sound... :/ ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

As a first revision, just basically being able to control an existing Spotify session
Log in / out, list playlists and their contents
Control play/pause, next, prev, volume etc... and note that it should be possible to play a playlist
get currently playing song, get next song in the play queue (or just in general, being able to get the itemnumber of the currently playing song in a playlist)

In other words, basic remote control functionality.

For a more advanced revision, be able to query the spotify search api and be able to manipulate playlists ( $playlists->create('foo'); $playlists->getPlaylist('foo')->addSong( hashid ) ), allowing for actual automation of the client.

Now, since my primary interest is in the first part, i'll flesh that out.
Metadata that would be nice to have access to is:
Playlist
-Name
-Created
-Last played

Song
-Name
-Playcount
-Artist (incl. hashid)
--AMG data/biography?
--Similar artists?
-Album (incl. hashid)
--Label?
--AMG data?
--Cover-art
-Year
-Length

That's off the top of my head.
I'd imagine there'll be quite a few plugins for XBMC, Plex, Boxee etc., so the general idea would be to expose enough data to more or less wrap the Spotify functionality inside them. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Actually, I think it'd be best if the mailinglist Andreas Ehn talked about were launched.
It'd be easier to read through comprehensive ideas, do traditional mailinglist voting etc ;)

Basically, I'm pretty sure you guys know what we'd like to see in an API.. after all, it's probably what you'd like to see as well.

Along those lines, Andreas Setterlind's comment below regarding the documentation is a major point.

All in all, it's probably better if you guys write an initial spec, and we throw lots of feedback at it.
I don't think anyone's expecting the API to be full-fledged from day one, so start off with the basics, release that and look at what the community needs to be able to improve. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Youtube URL:s has the same "problem" as Spotify URI:s; there is no way of knowing what the content behind the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jIJDO...

Youtube offers access to all meta data through http://gdata.youtube.com
An example for the youtube URL above would be:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/vi...

Querying for Artist/Song/Album/Popularity/Genre using a Spotify URL like that would make life a lot easier and it shouldn't take too long to implement. I guess the amount of data transmitted could be cut down by offering the most common stuff (probably artist/song name) in one request and complete meta data in another.

XML is well known and easy to understand for most people.

I was hoping for an API where 3:rd party apps could query the client for "currently playing" and for "add x to playlist y" but I understand you're going for a webservice first. I guess maybe it would be possible to authenticate with the service to be able to get currently playing track from there, depending on the architecture of your system ofc. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I think it would also be nice if we could get the songs of a playlist from the playlist's HTTP link. It would be very interesting for web developers, because by now people can't see the playlist content except if they open it with Spotify... ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I agree with mrc2407 - the most useful API would be to fetch content of playlists. Perhaps you could be inspired by Last.fm's API for Playlists? http://www.lastfm.se/api/show?service... ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I would really love official API as well, but before we're getting one, I've written a little software that gets metadata using despotify gateway. It was originally for IRC bot use only, and it still has some bugs and "features", but I've been requested turning it into a web service. We'll see, but at least despotify gateway is a good starting point if someone wants to get metadata from Spotify URLs. The IDs in URLs are base62 encoded by the way, in case that helps someone. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Here's Rasmus's own code to convert between UUIDs and Spotify URIs, useful in combination with despotify.
http://github.com/rsms/snippets/blob/...

+1 on playlist/meta data API. I for one would like to create a service where you could backup your playlist or track modifications. It's been a few times where I've had my playlists deleted or emptied. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

To much mess to close the listings inside a closed closet. Better would it thought to let users to browse spotify before they join so they see what they paying for. It is the streaming that is needed to be licensed. Otherwize, all catalouge sites would be illegal (last.fm,discogs, all music guide etc.). Giving the spotify resource out without authentication is also not illegal since you need to use a spotify client to listen to the stream ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Awesome.
Hadn't heard bout that :D ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I sure hope that the "Legal Department" over at Spotify looks at this the right way and realize that it's a Good ThingTM and that they should support hacking of this kind, especially when it doesn't hurt their core business model. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I agree Peter, in the future their business is hopefully payment routines, signing contracts with record companies and supplying a vanilla client and then leave it up to the users in what way (with what software) they wish to connect to Spotify (using valid user accounts ofc). The whole API thing doesn't seem to happen anyway, I guess they have enough to do anyway. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I too am hoping that Spotify will choose to co-exist peacefully with open clients. At least let paying premium users connect with unofficial players. A pure text-based interface is truly a dream-come-true for my lightweight desktop. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

There's a Java port out since a few day ago called Jotify. It's apparently based off despotify.
http://github.com/fxb/jotify/tree/master
Haven't tried it myself but others claim success. ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Any thought about a PHP API? ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

that's cool...but it sucks that you have to be a premium user to use it. I am more interested in an API that controls the official player -- for example, methods to get the properties of the current track, to browse to a page, to switch the track, manage playlists, etc. (even searching?) ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

Just that thing I seek for ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )

I agree denton29. It's very disappointing if you're only interested in extending functionality of the existing player. I have to buy a premium account, to extend the Spotify product, something which would (hopefully) benefit Spotify's userbase. Really? ( Delete or Edit for 15 minutes )