I started playing around with a new package today which I’ve titled spotty. spotty’s goal is to be a minimal wrapper around the spotify API. It intends to only do a small number of things but do them well.
There is of course the very well done package spotifyr by Charlie Thompson. spotty is not indended to compete with this package at all, and will not come anywhere near the breadth of features offered by spotifyr
The motivation
I’m interested in maintaining a list of all the tracks I’ve saved on Spotify. My reasoning here is that if Spotify was to close, or my account gets closed, I should have a way to rebuild my saved tracks, which is made up mostly of one-off or more esoteric songs, and therefore would be harder to rebuild from memory.
I started by trying to use spotifyr but quickly ran into an error while trying to access my saved tracks. I looked through the source code to try find where the error was, but was unable to find a fix. As an alternative I thought I might try making a small package which had two functions: retrieving saved tracks, and saved albums. By design they would return the complete list of tracks/albums, as opposed to the spotifyr approach where you have to use a combination of limit, offset, and lapply to get the complete list, rather than just the last 20.
The package is still very early, and this shouldn’t be' interpreted as a release announcement - more just a look into what I’m' currently working on. Therefore, please don’t expect any guarantees or documentation (yet).
You can see the current state of development at this repo. Currently working is the function get_saved_tracks(). It should work, but will require you to register a Spotify dev account, get a client id and client secret, and save them as environment variables. Check out the source code for details.
spotty development will probably continue shortly, but just wanted to give a glance to my current dev thoughts. Please open an issue if you’d like to use this soon and I can prioritise some things
Hope everyone is well