Question: How to start playing "Liked Songs"

[supersej]

I have a question I cant seem to find an answer for. At least not with my google skills.

I would like to start playing my Spotify "Liked Songs" via Spotcast on Homeassistant, but can't seem to figure out how (if Spotcast do support this feature).

From the Spotify web player I would open
https://open.spotify.com/collection/tracks

The official Spotify API has a call for it
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/#/operations/get-users-saved-albums

For Mopidy it seems like they found a solution to play the collection
mopidy/mopidy-spotify#313

I've tried using
spotify:your:tracks
and spotify:playlist:tracks
but with no luck

Could you please point me in the right direction :)

Best regards Daniel

[fcusson]

Saddly, liked songs is not a playlist in the normal sense of Spotify. And because of that, it lacks a URI. The current way spotcast handles media playback is purely based on uri (even the search function is just a wrapper to get a uri based on the search results).

I looked into the /me/playlist and there is no mention of the liked songs in it. So even from an API endpoint it doesn't seems to be exposed.

[supersej]

Thanks for the fast answer. Even though I was hoping that there was a way.

Have you got any idea how they solved it in Mopidy then?
Is that something that can maybe be ported to Spotcast?

[fcusson]

oh god, it seems it's actually something that can be done, just that the endpoint is not user friendly. That would require some extensive changes to spotcast, but basically:

current_user_saved_tracks will return a list of uri from the liked song playlist. Sincve its not a playlist uri, we would need to start media playback on the first song and then use add_to_queue for the rest of the songs.

That should work and is probably what mopidy does, because the only way to access songs in the liked songs "playlist" is on a per song basis.

To go even further, we would probably need a logic to fetch song with a certain number limit and then offset and repeat until we have the full playlist. We could always limit the number of songs, but with the non-organisable nature of the liked songs "playlist" it wouldn't be a great UX.

[supersej]

Wow kudos for the great job of actually figure out how it is done.

That would also explain why "liked songs" is not like other Playlist, because well it's just a big pile of songs queued together.

And yes I can imagine that it would be challenging when the list of liked songs contains hundreds or thousands of song, that the add to queue needs to be split up and maybe even include a delay.

Is there any way to see In the list when a song has been liked?
Because if not, theoretical the songs could be played random every time? Unless the pull of songs is listed by when added.

Really great job so far 👍 😉

[taciturnaxolotl]

Use {user_uri}:collection as the URI.

[taciturnaxolotl]

Replace {user_uri} with the URI you get when you go to your profile in the Spotify desktop app and try to share a link to your profile but hold ctrl or option when pressing copy link to profile.

[fcusson]

functionality working in beta