[PROBLEM] Newbie questions: web interface login, Spotify and radio stations

[Tim Curtis]

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Events

[Nutul]

This is fun to work through, for sure, but at some point you have to ask "is it worth the effort"? I don't know. Is it?
(after all, if someone wants to know what song is playing, simply look at the Spotify app on your phone/tablet)

I was also thinking about having Spotify playing while moOde shows its nowplaying screen with the proper metadata and album-art...

[cogitech]

This is fun to work through, for sure, but at some point you have to ask "is it worth the effort"? I don't know. Is it?
(after all, if someone wants to know what song is playing, simply look at the Spotify app on your phone/tablet)

I was also thinking about having Spotify playing while moOde shows its nowplaying screen with the proper metadata and album-art...

Absolutely. That's the whole idea. It is just "eye candy" though. There is no real practical use.

I can see it being more useful for people with a screen attached to their Pi. It would look nice.

In my specific use case, I use the browser on my iPad to operate moOde. When I switch to Spotify streaming, I use the Spotify app on my iPad (which I connect to libre-spot running in moOde). There is no reason to visit the moOde webui unless I want to disconnect Spotify and play something from my local library, so it doesn't matter much to me what is displayed on the moOde webui. The Spotify app shows me everything.

It would look nice (pretty) and I can see why some people would want it.

If play/pause, skip/next, etc could be integrated, now that would be much more practical.

[Tim Curtis]

This is fun to work through, for sure, but at some point you have to ask "is it worth the effort"? I don't know. Is it?
(after all, if someone wants to know what song is playing, simply look at the Spotify app on your phone/tablet)

I was also thinking about having Spotify playing while moOde shows its nowplaying screen with the proper metadata and album-art...

Its not good to intertwine code for two different players. That would be a no-go approach for me.

It seems like you can get the track id from the librespot event script via the env variable. From there it gets more involved because there are a lot of moving parts rendering something to the WebUI. You also prolly don't want to bloat the event script if its blocking.

You might want to wait until I make the camilla 2 commit this week because it includes enhancements to the renderer event scripts that make debugging them much easier.

ETA: It would prolly be better to create a separate "Spotify cover art" thread

[Nutul]

Its not good to intertwine code for two different players. That would be a no-go approach for me.

Yes, but for Spotify instead of the generic renderer playing screen we could have one that resembles the cover-art view in moOde, having its own php and JS handler.

It seems like you can get the track id from the librespot event script via the env variable. From there it gets more involved because there are a lot of moving parts rendering something to the WebUI. You also prolly don't want to bloat the event script if its blocking.

We can already do that, and according to the documentation of librespot that script is non-blocking, so the 2/3 seconds necessary for Spotify metadata collection should not be relevant.

Of course we'll think about integrating it; for now it is more a POC, surely needs some testing.
Creating a new thread about it is a good idea.

[cogitech]

Its not good to intertwine code for two different players. That would be a no-go approach for me.

It seems like you can get the track id from the librespot event script via the env variable. From there it gets more involved because there are a lot of moving parts rendering something to the WebUI. You also prolly don't want to bloat the event script if its blocking.

You might want to wait until I make the camilla 2 commit this week because it includes enhancements to the renderer event scripts that make debugging them much easier.

ETA: It would prolly be better to create a separate "Spotify cover art" thread

Good points, Tim. I defer to your reasoning on this for sure.

As admin, can you split the relevant posts off into a new thread? (I know some forum software allows admins/mods to do that)

[Tim Curtis]

I could split them but its best to leave it up @Nutul to create a new thread to continue the discussion if there is interest.

[Nutul]

I could split them but its best to leave it up @Nutul to create a new thread to continue the discussion if there is interest.

At least to get to the point where moOde can be aware of the metadata of the currently playing track on Spotify-connect... I am interested, so @Tim Curtis  here's the thread, thanks for moving our wandering ideas over there.

https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=6183

As mentioned, this can be useful in a scenario where moOde has an attached display, or HDMI-outputs to a TV for eye-candy during playback... a headless installation gets almost no benefit out of this feature. But I do have a local display attached, so... 

[robinhood]

Hi guys....So i came to this forum about 2 months ago looking to exactly do this. I want to be able to see the Current Track, Album, Artist info and Album art on my attached display while using Spotify connect. Playback controls would be an added bonus to me.

I did find this post where someone pointed out that Moode uses Librespot and that this library does not have an API but the Librespot-java does.
https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1054
They also said that they had no idea on how replace librespot with librespot-java within Moode. I don't either so i set out a different path and build a little python-flask app that starts librespot-java and then uses the local API to query track info and display the info with the album art on a full page webpage. Works great but it misses out on all the other features that Moode has to offer.

I came back to the forum on a whim and saw this post. Do you think that replacing librespot with librespot-java is a more practical approach than reading the logs to extract the track info and connecting directly to Spotify API? The librespot-java api also has playback control so adding buttons for that would also be possible. I'd love to help accomplish this via either method but i am admittedly terrible at formal software development. I really just hack stuff together in python sometimes to make life easier. Let me know if this approach is viable, and if anyone is willing to give it a shot/stumble through it with me.

[Nutul]

Hi guys....So i came to this forum about 2 months ago looking to exactly do this. I want to be able to see the Current Track, Album, Artist info and Album art on my attached display while using Spotify connect. Playback controls would be an added bonus to me.

I did find this post where someone pointed out that Moode uses Librespot and that this library does not have an API but the Librespot-java does.
https://moodeaudio.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1054
They also said that they had no idea on how replace librespot with librespot-java within Moode. I don't either so i set out a different path and build a little python-flask app that starts librespot-java and then uses the local API to query track info and display the info with the album art on a full page webpage. Works great but it misses out on all the other features that Moode has to offer.

I came back to the forum on a whim and saw this post. Do you think that replacing librespot with librespot-java is a more practical approach than reading the logs to extract the track info and connecting directly to Spotify API? The librespot-java api also has playback control so adding buttons for that would also be possible. I'd love to help accomplish this via either method but i am admittedly terrible at formal software development. I really just hack stuff together in python sometimes to make life easier. Let me know if this approach is viable, and if anyone is willing to give it a shot/stumble through it with me.

"Sounds" interesting.

there are a lot of things to examine in detail, first of all the authentication thing; then there is the problem about the -headless version (of I cannot remember what...) unable to find / enumerate the audio mixers; and in moOde it HAS to be headless.


At the moment we have a POC that can retrieve the following data, starting from a track ID (received from librespot on every track change event):

Artist
Album (year and title)
Track (index, title and duration
Album art

Al the control takes place on your mobile device.

It is not integrated yet, as work needs to be done; but it is here.
(I have a 7'' display attached too, and a @cogitech idea triggered my curiosity so I started playing with the thing a week ago... and got so far)

I also have no idea how heavy a Java app will be for moOde, letting alone all the burden of keeping it up-to-date