spotifyRadioPlaylist

Putting the latest tracks from a radio station with online trackservice (like this one) onto a spotify playlist by crawling the radio website.

More on the background of this project in my blog post.

Demo

Currently running hourly via cronjob on this playlist

Actually you find a growing list of playlists from multiple radio stations being crawled by the spotify account RadiolistenerBot.

All those playlists are public. My bot happily accepts new followers on his profile and on his playlists!

Usage

Before running it on the server you need to authenticate via oAuth (as the user who owns the specified playlist) locally.

1. Clone this repo into a local directory
2. Copy config.example.json to config.json and insert your own credentials & playlistIds for your desired radio stations. You can obtain a clientId & clientSecret by registering a new application.
   There are some pre-defined and tested radio stations, they can be found in station-examples.md. You can define your own schemes, all you need is the URL of the playlist page of the station and three jQuery selectors: one for the playlist entry element, one for the title and one for the artist. Some radio stations (like the old FM4 page) have special markup that requires linear instead of nested search; this behaviour can be set with the searchLinear flag.
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm start <stationIdentifier> (stationIdentifier is the name of the playlist config inside your config file.)
5. Open the displayed URL in your browser & grant permission for your app to change your playlists. This will open a page on localhost which you can close. Now you find two new files: accessToken and refreshToken. They contain the secret information to authenticate the user with spotify, so handle with care!

This should have added the first tracks to your playlist already. Every time you run npm start <stationIdentifier> again, the script will check if there are new tracks that have not been added to the playlist yet.

You may want to run this on a server via cronjob every X minutes or so (depending on how many results your trackservice delivers in one page).

1. Clone this repo on your server into a non-public directory
2. Copy your local accessToken and refreshToken onto the server
3. Copy your local config.json onto the server and change the last entry to "localEnvironment": false
4. Run npm install
5. Configure your cronjob to run node main.js <stationIdentifier> every X minutes (don’t forget to change to the correct directory first! - this can be done with a bash script)

Adding new Radio Stations to the config

Currently there are two different types of crawling available:

1. Special API crawling for ORF APIs like https://audioapi.orf.at/fm4/api/json/current/broadcasts.
2. Classic crawling for HTML tracklistings. This covers most radio stations.

For the first type (ORF API) only three Parameters are required:

• playlistId: spotify ID for the playlist to add new tracks to
• orfApi: true: flag to activate this mode
• radioTrackserviceUrl: API URL

For the second type there are also some optional parameters available. This is the default crawling mode.

• playlistId: spotify ID for the playlist to add new tracks to
• radioTrackserviceUrl: URL to the page with track listings
• radioEntrySelector: jQuery style Selector for the encapsulating element that contains the info for exactly one track (i.e. .list-item). This is not used, when using the option searchLinear.
• searchLinear: true: optional & experimental. Set this to true, when tracks are not encapsulated individually, but are listed one after another. The website this mode was implemented for doesn’t exist anymore, so this is not well tested at the moment.
• radioTitleSelector: jQuery style Selector for the title text.
• removeFromTitleString: optional. String to remove from title (i.e. Title:). This is necessary when title info and other texts are not separated correctly by the website owner.
• radioArtistSelector: jQuery style Selector for the artist text.
• removeFromArtistString: optional. String to remove from Artist (i.e. Artist:). This is necessary when artist info and other texts are not separated correctly by the website owner.

Updates

To update run git pull in your installation and you will get the latest changes.

Please note: Upgrading a Patch release (like from 2.2.0 to 2.2.1) will work with your existing config-file, upgrading a Major or Minor release might make it neccessary to upgrade your configuration. Please read the release notes and refer to the config.example.json file.

Contributing

If you successfully use this script for a radio station that is not listed yet in station-examples.md, please open a pull request to add that config to the examples or open a new issue and I will add it. It might help others. (Don’t forget to remove your clientId & clientSecret!)

If you try this script on a new radio station and something doesn’t work, open an issue with a description of the problem & your radio station config (Don’t forget to remove your clientId & clientSecret!). Maybe we can get it to work.

Feel free to fork the project. If you want to implement a new feature, open a new issue so we can figure out how this fits into the existing structure. I’m looking forward to pull requests :)