Detecting Spotify Song Plays

Question

I'm working on a mobile application that detects song plays from various media players, both on iPhone and Android. We currently support a number of applications in both platforms. Our application works in a similar way to how Last.FM detects and automatically scrobbles plays.

However, we have not been able to get a working solution for detecting Spotify song plays that does not need to use either Last.FM scrobbling (available in Spotify for Android only) or Facebook as a proxy.

I've tried a few things for android but as I understand it (I see lots of posts e.g. Find what song is playing in spotify on android), the Android Application does not broadcasts media related intents for song plays, so we need something more creative. In any case this does not solve our problem for the iPhone use case.

Lib-spotify held some promise for us, and I've manged to build an application that can create a session and navigate some playlists, but I have not figured out if I can load what would appear as "play history" in the Desktop Application via lib-spotify (e.g. is this a special form of playlist?). I have also tried a Spotify App to accomplish the same but the API appears to not to expose required functionality.

It seems like I've exhausted all avenues on this one, but does anybody have any suggestions for something I haven't tried?

Assume that I have spotify credentials for each user whose history I would like to gather.

Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the desktop play history is local to each machine, meaning it can't be accessed through libspotify or any other API.

At the moment, there isn't a way to reliably achieve what you're wanting to do on mobile platforms.

Answer 2

Spotify has a metadatachanged intent-action that contains artist, album, track, length, and id values. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22195867/1345586