Spotify Web "Now playing"

Install from the Chrome Web Store.

This Chrome extension keeps a JSON file on the local filesystem in sync with the current song on Spotify Web. This allows to pick up the changes to that file and display them in whatever fashion you fancy. See below for integration examples.

As opposed to other extensions such as this one, no data is sent to a third-party. As legit as these might be, I don't want to unnecessarily depend on Firebase or other cloud providers just to retrieve some locally-available information.

The code is short and simple and MIT licensed.

Usage

1. Install the extension.
2. Open or reload Spotify Web.
3. Click the green icon to pick the location of the JSON file.
4. The icon will disappear and the current song will immediately be written to the JSON file. Try skipping to another song: the file content is updated immediately.

Written file format

{
  "cover": "https://i.scdn.co/image/<some identifier>",
  "song": "The Song Name",
  "artist": "The Artist Name"
}

Example: monitoring changes with tail

Note the -F flag instead of the commonly used -f. This is because Chrome uses an atomic rename when writing the file.

tail -F /tmp/now-playing.json

Example: monitoring changes with inotifywait and jq

declare -r file=/tmp/now-playing.json
while true; do
    jq -r '"♫ " + .song + " – " + .artist' < "$file"
    # Chrome renames the file when writing, hence the "delete_self" event.
    inotifywait -q -e delete_self "$file" > /dev/null
done

Building on that example, here is a Polybar module for showing the now-playing song:

[module/now-playing]
type = custom/script
tail = true
interval = 4
exec-if = test -f /tmp/now-playing.json
exec = while true; do jq -r '"♫ " + .song + " – " + .artist' < /tmp/now-playing.json && inotifywait -q -e delete_self /tmp/now-playing.json >/dev/null || exit 1; done

This achieves the following:

License

MIT.