• Spotify Developer Api
• Spotify Api Example

As far as I can tell Spotify has been hacked and someone is messing up with the repository. It wouldn't surprise me if someone had embedded a cryptocurrency miner in the software. I'm loving how Spotify has been super fast to solve this, lol. It's a software that can run x86 applications on ARM devices. So you would be able to install the linux version of Spotify and benefit of the spotify connect. The only trouble is the fact that it cost 24.95€, almost the price of the Pi itself ^^ Good luck 🙂.

7 Free Ways to Download Spotify to MP3 in 2020

With more than 40 million songs, Spotify offers a massive music library that you can listen to online without taking your storage space. If you pay the premium subscription fee, you can also listen to music offline.

The only problem is that you can’t transfer them anywhere or play them with other music players other than Spotify because the music files you downloaded with Spotify are DRM(Digital Rights Management) protected. In this article, I will show you 7 ways to download songs from Spotify as MP3 without recording even if you don’t have Spotify Premium. No matter what devices you use, you can find at least 2 methods that work for you.

Disclaimer

All these methods are for personal or educational use only.

Free premium spotify app. You should not use any of these tools to pirate or distribute music.

Some of the methods may be illegal to use this in your country, so be informed.

Method 1: Download Spotify song or playlist with Siri Shortcuts

If you are using an iOS device, you probably have heard of the automation application Shortcuts, which is the updated version of Workflow. I have three shortcuts to help you download music from Spotify.

If you are not familiar with Shortcuts, you can free download it from AppStore and get a few pre-made shortcuts in the Shortcuts Gallery to see how it work. To get the shortcuts that I am about to show you, you just open the link in Safari to download it.

This Spotify playlist downloader can only download an entire Spotify playlist. You will have an option to select some of the tracks in the playlist to download if you don’t want to download them all.

Note: This only works for playlist. It won’t work if you input a Spotify track link. It is recommended to run it from Spotify share sheet.

You can simply copy the Spotify playlist link from Spotify app and run this shortcut. You can also tap the Share button to run this shortcut from the share sheet. Besides the playlist link, you can also input playlist ID Or playlist URI to download Spotify playlist to MP3.

When downloaded, you can open the Files app, and then select iCloud > Shortcuts > Music to check the downloaded MP3 file. If you are not familiar with iOS Shortcuts, be sure to watch this video below to see how it works.

For advanced users, you can also use Shortcuts to Move Spotify Playlist to Apple Music and vise versa. Though the authentication process is a little complicated when you want to transfer playlists to Spotify by using Spotify API.

Method 2: Download Spotify to MP3 Using Telegram Bot

If you use Telegram, you can simply use a Telegram bot to download free music whether you are on Android or iOS. It does not require any setup or your Spotify account login info. All you need is this @SpotifyMusicDownloaderBot. After you get this bot, type “/start” (without quotes) and then you can paste any Spotify track link to start downloading music for free. If you are using iOS, you may want to tap the Share button and save to Files after the music is downloaded.

If you do like using Telegram bots to download music, you probably also want to check this post to get more Telegram Bots for music.

Method 3: Download Spotify Playlist to FLAC or MP3

There is another open-source software called Deezloader, which is developed to download music from Deezer, can also be used to download a playlist from Spotify. The software actually converts the Spotify playlist to Deezer playlist and then download music from Deezer. You can set it to download Spotify Playlist as MP3 or FLAC. The lastest version Deezloader Remix 4.2.2 also allows you to download any single Spotify track and it much easier to set up.

Step 1. Download and install Deezer Remix. Log in with your Deezer account (free account also works).

Step 2. Go to this link: https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/applications and log in with your Spotify account (free account works).

Spotify Developer Api

Step 3. Click on Create a Client ID and then compile the form as you like.

Step 4. Save the settings and then you will see the Client ID and Client Secret. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret to Deezloader Remix.

If you are using an older version of Deezloader Remix, the setup is a little bit complicated than this. You can refer to this video to see the configure process.

As you know, not all tracks on Spotify are also available on Deezer, so you will see some tracks are failed to download because Deezloader cannot find the matched songs. If you want a tool to download all tracks from Spotify playlist, keep reading to see the next tool.

Update: Since Deezloader is discontinued, you can only use this method to download 128kbps MP3. If you prefer high quality, jump to Method 5.

Method 4: Download Spotify to MP3 with AllToMP3

AllToMP3 is free open source software that allows you to download music from Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Deezer. It is available in Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you check the source code, it is easy to find out that it actually matches the Spotify music track with YouTube video and convert YouTube video to MP3, so the music quality is not as good the other methods. You can free download from its website or Github.

After installation, you can paste the Spotify song link or playlist link and press Enter to start downloading. The music, by default, will be saved in the Music folder. The downloaded music files include all the tags and cover art, but the quality is nowhere close to the next free tool.

Method 5: Download Spotify Music Using Allavsoft

Allavsoft is your ultimate media downloader software for Windows and Mac. It allows you to directly download Spotify playlist, album music to MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, WMA, etc with ID3 tags.

The latest version allows you to download Spotify music as FLAC (1441 kbps). Unlike Deezloader, you download all the songs that Deezloader cannot download, literally, unmatched songs with Allavsoft. For me, Allavsoft is the best Spotify Music Downloader.

Once you get it installed, you can copy the Spotify music link whether it is a song, album, or playlist and then launch Allavsoft. The program will automatically paste the URL and you just need to click Download to start downloading.

By default, it saves Spotify music to MP3 as 320 kbps with artwork and other metadata, so you don’t need to check the option “Automatically Convert to”. If you choose the Best Available quality, you may find some songs are downloaded as FLAC 1411 kbps, which is really cool. If you want to convert Spotify Music to FLAC, WAV, AIFF, AAC, WMA, DTS, etc, you can click the “Automatically Convert to” button to select the specific format from the drop-down menu.

Besides Spotify, Allavsoft allows you to download music from Deezer, SoundCloud, MixCloud, and download videos from Udemy, Lyda, YouTube, Facebook, etc. That is to say, Allavsoft is the only downloader software that you ever need.

Method 6: Convert Spotify music to MP3 with TuneMobie

There are many programs that claim to be able to convert Spotify, but deep down they are recording the audio, TuneMobie is one of them. I tried both free and paid versions. Let me tell you how it really works.

When you open this program TuneMobie, it asks you to launch the Spotify app or download it if you haven’t. Then you can see in the preference where you can select to save as mp3, m4a, WAV, and FLAC. These are all the supported audio formats and other settings that you customize.

When you try to convert a song, the Spotify app actually plays the song, but you hear no sound. Compared to other audio-recording kinds of competitors, Tunemobie Spotify Converter is 5 times faster. Usually, it takes less than 1 minute to convert a song.

You can also copy a playlist link to download Spotify playlist as MP3 or other formats. The trial version allows you to download (record) unlimited tracks for the first 3 munites in 30 days, which is much better than its competitors.

Method 7: Download Spotify with a Chrome extension

If you use Chrome web browser, you can install this free extension and then you can see a download button appears when you go to Spotify web player. You now can click on the download button to download almost all the songs from Spotify web player.
Why do I say almost? Because this extension certainly is not downloading music from Spotify directly. You just download music from its own server, so you will see some Spotify tracks are not available in their server for downloading. Some tracks downloaded using this extension may not be the same version as the Spotify version.

Bonus: Chimera — Multiple Source Music Downloader for Advanced Users Only

Chimera is a command-line based multiple source music downloader that allows you to download music from Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Soundcloud, Napster, Qobuz, Google Play Music, etc.

It is open-source and completely free to use for educational and private use only. It is very powerful, but the setup process is more complicated than the other methods. You can choose Spotify source from Deezer, Tidal, or Qobuz.

As you know, Tidal and Qobuz provide Hi-res quality music. If you have paid subscription, you can use this tool to download Spotify music in very high quality in FLAC format.

You will need to grant your Spotify account through Spotify client ID and client secret. Based on your choice, you need to also set up Deezer, Tidal, or Qobuz account. For detailed steps, check this guide to see how to set it up.

Conclusion

That’s all the seven different methods for downloading Spotify music to MP3. If you care about music quality, then Allavsoft is the best choice. Personally, I like the Allavsoft method the most because it is convenient, high quality, and with cover art. More importantly, you don’t need any other video/music downloader software anymore once you have Allavsoft installed since it supports more than 1000 websites.

If you really love the iOS environment, then Shortcuts is a great way to download music on iPhone. Now, it is your turn. Which method are you going to try first? If you have other better method to download music from Spotify, please share it in the comments.

Spotify released recently a set of endpoints in beta to fetch information of what is playing and send playback commands. This allows for a wide range of integrations and I wanted to hack a bit with it.

What is Spotify Connect

Spotify Connect is a way to transmit the playback from one device to another one without having to use a physical connection like a cable or bluetooth. You can send the music from your Spotify desktop client to a speaker, from the Spotify app on mobile to Spotify for PlayStation, from the Spotify web player to Chromecast… In short, you have controllers and devices that can play music.

Spotify’s Web Player (zoomed in). Clicking on the icon next to the volume we get a list of connected devices (FireTV, desktop client, speakers and the web player).

Your application can become a controller through the Web API endpoints, getting information about what is playing currently and from where, being able to transmit the playback to another connected device or interact with the current context (pausing, changing the volume, skipping, playing something else…).

How to use the endpoints

Before using the Connect endpoints we need to obtain an access token on behalf of the user with certain permissions. There is more information about what scopes are needed in the documentation for each endpoint.

You don’t need to have a premium account to get the playback status, a free account is alright. You will do need a premium one if you want to send commands to change the playback.

A caveat at the moment is that the endpoints don’t support any kind of web socket connection nor long polling. Thus, if you want to get updates on the position of the current playing track or any other change in the context, you need to poll every few seconds.

A small library to make it easier to use the endpoints

The trickiest part of using the Spotify Web API is to implement the authorization flow. The Authorization Guide does a good job explaining it, but I thought I could do something so developers wouldn’t need to worry about setting up the whole flow, hiding away the authentication and just getting.

That’s why I have created spotify-player. It’s both a server and a library that you use to communicate with it. To use it, you just need to include a script, call login() and subscribe to the updates:

You can forget about setting up a Spotify application and a server, carrying out the token exchange, token refresh, and persisting the current user, so you can focus on the fun part.

Other methods include a function to make calls to other Spotify endpoints reusing the same access token, so you can fetch other data that can help you creating a more complete visualisation.

Let’s have a look at this pen as an example of a basic visualisation:

And in case you can’t try it or don’t have a Spotify account this is pretty much what it looks like:

See the Pen on Codepen

I have kept the example very basic since the point is understanding the usage of the library. If you are into performance and UX you’ll see there is room for improvement, but as a front-end developer I know an example can get out of hand very easily when adding things.

I encourage you to fork it and start making your own visualisation. And once you do it, ping me so I include it in this Codepen collection.

Possible applications

Disclaimer: This is a list of some use cases. You still need to comply with Spotify’s terms of use when implementing an application that uses Spotify’sWeb API. This might mean adding certain messaging and link to the song in Spotify.

Dynamic visualisations

You could combine the playback position with the audio analysis of the track to generate dynamic visualisations using loudness, tempo, key, timbre or pitch of the segments that compose the track. You can also use the endpoint to fetch audio features of a track, which gives you high level information about characteristics of the song.

See the Pen on Codepen and Possan’s original visualisation on GitHub

Now playing view

Are you a coffee-shop owner and people always wonder what song is playing? You could have a TV showing a branded now playing view. You could even have a widget on your website, or a script posting to a social network what is currently playing so your customers know. Or a small browser extension showing what is playing and/or showing desktop notifications when the track changes.

See the Pen on Codepen. When the track changes the browser shows a Web Notification.

Or if you are at home hosting a dinner or party, show on the TV or computer what is playing.

You can combine other Spotify Web API endpoints too. Eg you could fetch the artists info to show the artist profile image in the background:

See the Pen on Codepen. A simple visualisation of what’s playing in Spotify rendering the artist profile image as the background.

You could use an API like Musixmatch’s and create an app or a website showing the lyrics for the current song, synchronised with the playback position.

And your imagination is the limit. Use Genius’ API to get annotations about a song, or search for trivia and more info about the song or artist using Wikipedia’s API. And if you don’t want to miss what’s happening in the world, implement a news ticker in your view using News API.

See the Pen on Codepen

MVP

Spotify Api Example

The library is really small and it only supports reading the playback state and not send commands. Let’s call it an MVP. I might work on adding more features in the future.