A command line utility that goes through your spotify playlists (your own playlists and also the ones that you follow) and downloads it's songs metadata as CSV files. This utility works in Linux, MacOS and FreeBSD.

Problem

If something ever happens to spotify, all those lists of songs/podcasts/weird noises you curated over time will go meet the bin.

Solution

Backup their info using this program.

myspotifypl creates one CSV file per playlists, the file is named after the playlist itself. E.g. if the playlist is called "Summer Songs" then it's corresponding CSV will be "Summer Songs.csv" . For each song inside the playlist, the CSV will contain it's title, the name of it's album, the name of it's artist/band, the date in which the song was added to the playlist and also the song's length.

Setup

Step 1: Installing dependencies

For compiling the code, you'll need GCC or Clang (version 12 or higher). You'll also need libcurl and it's header files. Usually they both come with the curl package, but the headers might come separately in some libcurl-dev package of sorts depending on your package manager. After installing libcurl, make sure the curl.h header is accessible by the compiler, it'll probably be in the /usr/include/curl/ directory.

Step 2: create a spotify developer account and app

To access your account's playlists automatically, you first need to create a spotify developer account at spotify's developer page.

Next, create an app using your spotify developer account. You can name it whatever, the app's name doesn't really matter.

Once you have an app, go for it's settings page and search for the fields Client ID and Client Secret. Also add to the Redirect URIs field the URI http://localhost:8888. Now copy those three fields into the config.c file inside the myspotifypl project folder. After the copying, your config.c file should look something like this:

#define CLIENT_ID "your_client_id"
#define CLIENT_SECRET "your_client_secret"
#define REDIRECT_URI "http://localhost:8888"

Where you'll substitute the your_client_id and your_client_secret part with the ones you previously got from your app's settings. It is important that you keep their values surrounded by double quotes as in the example. Failing to do so will mess up the next step, where you'll compile the program's code.

NOTE: don't worry about leaving your "client id" and "client secret" inside a plain text file, this id and secret are only used for this random app that you created and have nothing to do with your actual spotify account secrets, like your password.

Step 3: compile the code

Enter the project's folder through the command line and execute the build.sh script with

$ sh build.sh

If the compilation worked, you should now see the executable myspotifypl inside the project's folder. If a gigantic, heinous multiple paged error message appeared as you executed the script, your config.c might not be well formatted and you should go revisit Step 2 of the setup process to make sure you typed everything correctly inside config.c.

To test if the executable is working, call

$ ./myspotifypl

If everything went well, you should see an error message of the likes of

Error: wrong parameters
usage: ./myspotifypl AUTHORIZATION_CODE
link for authorization code:
https://accounts.spotify.com/authorize?client_id=your_client_id_here&response_type=code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8888&scope=playlist-read-collaborative

Using the program

Finally, to actually use the program after the setup, you'll have to fetch something called an "authorization code" from spotify and pass it as an argument to the myspotifypl executable.

First, call the executable without any arguments.

$ ./myspotifypl

It will show you a message containing a link for authorization code:

Error: wrong parameters
usage: ./myspotifypl AUTHORIZATION_CODE
link for authorization code:
https://accounts.spotify.com/authorize?client_id=your_client_id_here&response_type=code&redirect_uri=http://localhost:8888&scope=playlist-read-collaborative

Notice that you shouldn't copy the above link from this README, it won't work. The link that shows up after you call the program changes depending on your config.c file.

After getting the link, access it through your web browser. If it's your first time doing this, you'll be redirected to a page asking for your spotify credentials for authentication so you can connect to that app created in Step 1 of the setup phase. This one is a delicate step, as you'll be giving away your password, so to make sure I'm not messing with you check the current URL of this credentials page to make sure it is really a spotify-owned domain.

After doing the authetication step (if you had to do authetication at all) you'll be redirected to a page showing an error and the authorization code will be inside the URI of that page as it's code argument, as shown in the picture below:

Now copy the authorization code from the URI and call the myspotifypl executable again, this time with the authorization code as an argument, e.g.

$ ./myspotifypl 'AQDEdJCafgntEmuIcgMWiGilHUdKUmlo1CAU9-XysytA4ibOZWxt8m8u58Pxy7CWgt1rUElHRHRhbhNGPmFTIglvMZk5BYJZ-uV-hs-2S7uLU1SxR3nrp_4J-fG4-BTqwYG6sT3F4WWizR6V-JpYZVrdzRATH_CAL3WP2BBQkwAPWYCmT4PVj5DDsh4BLHqXMAzSasDJ'

This will download your playlists' CSVs inside the current directory. Each time you want use the myspotifypl command, you'll have to generate a new authorization code by accessing the aforementioned link for authorization code again.