Spotify Random Album Selector

Posted on 17 Nov 2023 in programming • 2 min read

Spotify_RAS user interface

tl;dr: go to Spotify_RAS. A tool that choose Spotify albums from your saved ones and add them to your playing queue.

I listen to music all day. Mostly Video game music and I have been collecting albums for years. As a result I have around 400 albums saved in Spotify (and still growing), so every morning choosing my soundtrack of the day was a complex task and I end up listening a lot to the same albums.

For a time I used Paul's Random Album Selector.

Paul's UI

Once Paul's application had selected the albums and put them in a random order it was still necessary to manually add them to the playing queue by opening them one by one in the Spotify web app. It was tedious and, as the Spotify web UI is not the most responsive, it still took me minutes per day to set up my day's soundtrack.

Paul's UI

So I decided to develop my own Random Album Selector (writing this I feel like I should change the name :/). The goal was to reduce as much as possible the user interactions with the application. So it had to:

  • automatically select the albums
  • add them to the playing queue without user interaction
  • it would be nice if it was also possible to select tracks for the user's favorites tracks (this friend request).

Graph describing how the app works

As the application is still in "development" mode I need to manually add each user to the application (Spotify username and email). If you want to use it I will need to add your information to the users' whitelist.

Technical details

I used Vue.js for the application core and tailwindcss and daisyUI for the user interface.

The application is running client side only limiting the exposition of personal data. In addition, I limited the usage of Spotify permissions to the strict minimum: * the user-library-read to read the user's library and pick its saved albums or tracks * the user-modify-playback-state to add tracks to the playlist

The page is hosted with GitHub pages and the source code is available on GitHub.

reference: I published a reddit post on /r/truespotify in September 2023.