Andy Smith

Ever since Google launched ‘Google Instant’, people are all over this search-as-you-type style of doing things.

So I thought, can I make something similar with some javascript and the Spotify search APIs? So I did: Spotify Instant

The idea actually became to have a keyboard-only search mechanism where you can type, tab, then hit return to launch the track in Spotify.

Obviously it’s never going to be as fast as something Google have built, plus it has to back off a bit to prevent going over Spotify’s 10-requests-per-second limit, but for the most part it works fairly nicely.

Since writing it last night I’ve had a few thoughts how it could be made faster and more useful, but I thought I’d throw it out there for you to play with in the mean time. Forgive the lack of Popularity/song length formatting

This morning Spotify launched another couple of subscription variations which means there are now four ways to sign up – two free, and two paid.

Firstly – if you are already a member, this does NOT change your current subscription. If you were on the free version, you’re still on that & you still get unlimited, ad-supported listening. If you were on Premium, you’re still on Premium.

But which version is right for you? Well, everyone loves a good, quick flow-chart (click for full-size):

You should also be aware that not all mobile devices are treated equally. The Pansentient League has a great phone/features comparison chart.

For months now Spotify have stopped doing the Google Spreadsheets to let people know what has recently been added to the service. What’s worse, it caused a lot of problems for fan-made services like spotify.fm and – until I worked around it – Spotibot. This has upset a lot of people.

Well, a couple of days ago Spotify developer Rasmus produced a site “Latest Releases on Spotify” which takes a good guess of what’s new based on Spotify’s metadata API. I assumed it was a hack, but the latest blog post suggests it’s now the official solution.

Like a top fella he open-sourced his script, so in the hopes of helping to re-ignite the third-party developer scene I’ve made some minor changes to output the exact same list in JSON format. Get the feed here:

http://spotify.andysmith.co.uk/updates/latest_v1.json

If you’re unfamiliar with JSON it’s pretty straightforward. If you’re a PHP developer just read that URL into a string using file_get_contents() then run json_decode() on it.

Although I’ve produced the service, I’ve yet to consume it. Please let me know if there are problems or improvements I can make. Note the version number – if I make a big change I will update that number but keep the old ones running. That way any apps you make will still work.

Drop me a comment below if you find a use for it!