Shoutout to MyBridge for listing this project as one of the Top 10 Python Open Source Projects of June 2018!
Spotify Playlist Generator is a Python script that automatically builds a new Spotify playlist each week with new music. This script was written for personal use, so the playlist creation is authorized by an access token retreived for my Spotify account. I used Windows Task Scheduler to regulate the script to run every morning at 10:00 AM on my computer.
- The most recently acquired Spotify access token, the script's Spotify refresh token, and a Base64-encoded string containing my "app's" client ID and secret are stored in a local SQLite table called tokens (I've excluded this database from the repository because these tokens provide read and write access to my Spotify account).
- When the script starts, it first checks the authority of its current access token. Since this token expires after one hour, a new one will usually have to be generated. The script uses its refresh token, which never changes, to acquire a new access token from Spotify's token service.
- Now that it has a valid access token, it proceeds to scrape the current top 100 songs from HotNewHipHop, located at this URL: https://www.hotnewhiphop.com/top100/
- It parses through the page with the Beautiful Soup 4 library, building a list of "song candidates." A song qualifies as a candidate if its artist list contains at least one artist in a
desiredArtistslist defined at the beginning of the script (a static list of artists who I like). The binary search algorithm is used to check for matches. - Then, for each song candidate, it ensures that the candidate is not a duplicate by querying the songs_added local db table for a song name and primary artist match.
- Songs that are not duplicates are searched through Spotify's
/searchendpoint. The Spotifysong idsthat are found (since these songs are new, many aren't on Spotify yet) are accumulated into a list. - Now that the script has a list of song ids to add, it must determine whether to create a new playlist or add to the most recently created (or current) playlist. New playlist are created on Saturday. If it's a Saturday, the script uses the access token retrieved earlier to make a POST request to create a new playlist on my account, named New Songs {date}. Otherwise, it queries the local playlists_created table for the Spotify
playlist idof the most recently created playlist. - It then uses the
playlist idandsong idsto make a POST request to a Spotify endpoint that adds each song to the playlist, entering these songs into the songs_added local db table in the process.
This task is scheduled with Windows Task Scheduler:
