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Pitchfork also has its own app inside Spotify's player itself, featuring playlists, Best New Music recommendations, and more. Give it a go with Mark Richardson's review of Black Dice's new album. As of this writing, 36 applications are accessible inside of Spotify’s desktop app, with big names like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian providing their own apps. Download this app from Microsoft Store for Windows 10. See screenshots, read the latest customer reviews, and compare ratings for Spotify Music.
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From its beginning, Spotify had one mission: Give subscribers access to a nearly limitless, all-you-can-stream jukebox of millions of songs for one monthly fee. By doing that well, it gained millions of users and helped transform the way we listen to music. But now, thanks to the introduction of Spotify apps, it's letting third-party developers enhance the Spotify experience. These free apps add new features to Spotify, including new ways to discover music, customized concert information, and even help learning new languages. Check out these suggestions for 10 great Spotify apps you need to try.
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Spotify changed the way listeners enjoy music. Rather than downloading songs and albums and loading them onto MP3 players and smartphones, Spotify's all-you-can-stream service gives virtually any Internet-connected device access to a nearly unlimited jukebox of streaming music. When it introduced apps, the company aimed to change the way you enjoy Spotify itself.
Just like smartphone apps, Spotify apps are small programs that, once added to your account, supply functionality such as curated playlists, customized recommendations for new music, concert listings, and lyrics. Spotify apps are free and can enhance your experience. Here are 10 great Spotify apps to check out.
Discover New Music
These Spotify apps get you started discovering new music.
Lazify - Want suggestions of new music you might like based on what you already enjoy? Lazify (Figure 1) can help. Begin by dragging a song or playlist to the Lazify app, and it creates a playlist of music that you should enjoy. (If you're an iTunes user, this may sound familiar; it's the same principle behind Apple's iTunes Genius feature.) Playlists can be 10, 25, or 50 songs. If you really love Lazify's mix, save the playlist by clicking the save button or dragging it to your playlists. One note: if you drag a full album by the same artist to Lazify, the playlist it creates will be very heavily populated by that artist and will feature fewer new bands. For the best variety, drag a single song to Lazify.
Figure 1 Lazify builds a playlist of music based on your suggestion to help you discover new songs you'll like.
Sifter - This app (see Figure 2) functions much like Lazify, but instead of dragging a song or playlist into Sifter, type in the name of a song or artist you want to begin with. The app then lives up to its name and sifts through Spotify's huge music catalog to create a playlist of similar music. You can listen to the songs, refresh the playlist to generate new results, or—if you like what Sifter created—save the playlist to your Spotify account. Sign into Facebook via Sifter and you can see which of your friends like the artists you're discovering.
Figure 2 Like Lazify, Sifter introduces you to new music based on what you already like.
Curated Recommendations
These Spotify apps offer recommendations from expert music fans.
Pitchfork - Having a computer suggest new music based on algorithms is good, but sometimes there's no substitute for an expert music fan suggesting a great album. That's what the Pitchfork app (see Figure 3) offers. Pitchfork is one of the leading music websites. While it started out covering primarily indie rock, it has since expanded to feature everything from R&B to metal, hip hop to folk, while still covering rock in the exacting way that made it a success. The Pitchfork app offers all of Pitchfork's reviews—from daily installments to longer features like its Top 100 Tracks of the year—with embedded Spotify playlists.
Figure 3 The Pitchfork app includes quick access to Pitchfork's reviews, with embedded playlists.
Rolling Stone - For a more establishment (but no less authoritative) perspective on music than Pitchfork offers, check out the Rolling Stone app (see Figure 4). This app offers album reviews from the legendary music and culture magazine with embedded playlists for one-click access to the music you're reading about, as well as playlists from the magazine, such as the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time and mixes created specifically for Spotify.
Figure 4 Reviews from Rolling Stone are just one of the ways you'll find great music with this app.
![Pitchfork Pitchfork](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134139791/455619930.jpg)
Concerts & Events
Everybody loves live music. With these apps, find concerts and you’ll be crowd-surfing in no time.
Bandsintown Concerts -Want to find out when your favorite musicians are playing concerts near you? Bandsintown Concerts (see Figure 5) can help. Drag a song into the app to get information on that artist's performances. Connect this app to your Facebook account and it can access your Spotify playlists and provide the same info. Just looking for some live music? Bandsintown also lets you search by date and location for recommended concerts. When you've found one you're interested in, you can be delivered with one click to online options for buying tickets.
Figure 5 Find concerts based on date, location, and musician using Bandsintown Concerts.
FestConnect - If multi-artist festivals are more your speed, you'll enjoy FestConnect (see Figure 6). Enter a location, a radius within which to search, and a date and you'll get a list of all music festivals in the region at that time (the app is sponsored by McDonald's, so you'll also see the location of every McDonald's near the festival; that may or may not be a bonus, depending on your eating habits). For each festival, you can see the bands performing, listen to their music, and—if you're logged into Facebook—share details of what festivals you'll be at so you can make plans to meet your friends.
Figure 6 FestConnect helps you find virtually any music festival, based on location, artist, and date.
Advanced Tools
Some Spotify apps do more than just help you discover music. These apps offer additional features that turn things up a notch.
musiXmatch - In the good old days, CDs often came with booklets that listed all the lyrics for each song on the album. In our age of downloadable and streaming music, booklets are a rarity, as are lyric sheets. musiXmatch (see Figure 7) changes that by displaying lyrics for the songs you listen to in Spotify. Start playing a song, then go into the app and you'll not only see the song lyrics, but they are synced to the song so you read the lyrics as you hear them sung. You can also contribute lyrics or fix existing ones that are incorrect.
Figure 7 Read the lyrics as the band sings them using musiXmatch.
Playmysong - Use this Spotify app in conjunction with the free Playmysong smartphone app for Android, iOS, or Windows Phone to give friends, family, and party guests control over your Spotify account. This app (see Figure 8) turns Spotify into a crowd-controlled jukebox, making it perfect for parties where guests are the DJs or for just getting together with friends and swapping songs. You can control how many songs each person can play per hour, as well as how many times the same song can be played in the same timeframe.
Figure 8 Turn your Spotify app into a jukebox for your friends and family using Playmysong.
Not Music, Still Worthy
Spotify is good for more than just music. Who knew? Now that you know, you can take advantage of these cool apps.
Listen Language - Here's a kind of recorded audio that you might not expect to find on Spotify, but that can make a subscription even more valuable: foreign language instruction. This app (see Figure 9) collects foreign language courses from Spotify and then groups them by language for easy learning. The app includes 24 languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, Thai, Ukranian, and Tamil. Some languages have more courses than others (French and Spanish have six each, while Swahili has only one), but this is a pretty cool feature of Spotify. If you're interested in learning a new language, Listen Language could be a good first step.
Figure 9 Learn a foreign language using Spotify and Listen Language.
Official Comedy - While Spotify's main claim to fame is the access it provides to music, what it really offers is access to recorded audio. Music is the biggest category, but as the Official Comedy app proves, audio includes stand-up comedy, too. This app helps you find comedy recordings on Spotify by presenting you both featured comedians and themed topics. These themed playlists combine routines from many different comics on a single subject to give a hilarious look at the topic. The app also lets you share good one-liners, and links to the Spotify tracks they come from, on Facebook.
Figure 10 Turn off the music and turn on the laughs with the Official Comedy app.
There you have it: 10 apps that will change the way you interact with Spotify. They’re just the tip of the iceberg, so keep exploring what’s available.
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I'm a huge music nerd. I've played in many bands in my teens 20s, and music is a big part of my life. I'm also a big fan of Pitchfork music reviews.
There was a mashup site I was using called Pitchify, which was no longer updating, and it eventually got taken down. So I did what any engineer would do and I created my own mashup!
12inch.reviews is a mashup of Pitchfork's album reviews with Spotify's web playback SDK. It utilizes the browser's IndexedDB API to allow for fast, responsive searching and sorting of 17k+ album reviews, and allows you to play the full album right in the browser!
Pitchfork Spotify App Subscription
As with any side project, I had a few learning goals in mind that I wanted to bake in:
- Continue to invest in learning React, specifically React hooks, and progressive web apps.
- Learn tailwind.css
- I wanted it to include all of Pitchfork's reviews, and have them be easily searchable. There are a lot of seminal albums that I just haven't had exposure to. Being able to find them easily would be a requirement.
- I wanted to leverage different and interesting browser technologies to keep the main functionality of this site all on the frontend.
- I wanted it to be completely open source.
Pitchfork has over 20k reviews on their site, so being able to store that many records on the frontend, specifically in Javascript, would be a challenge. Each browser has different storage quotas that aren't particularly well-documented. So I needed to think about how to work around these quotas in a seamless and transparent way.
The backend
12inch.reviews uses a simple(ish) retriever script script that does the following:
- utilizes Pitchfork's undocumented API to find new albums since the last time the script was run
- Attempts to find that album using Spotify's search API.
- If found, add that album to a simple SQLite DB
There is another backend function that will take the contents of the SQLite DB and to create a series of JSON files, which includes all the data the frontend needs. Spotify premium free on iphone. The structure of each JSON album looks like so:
Once the JSON files are created, they are uploaded to S3 for the frontend to use. Each album entry has all the info needed in order for Spotify's web SDK to use them on the frontend, and to be searchable.
The retriever Rakefile also has functions to backfill all albums (takes multiple hours!) and has some utility functions to be able to create a new SQLite DB and other functions to massage the data into the correct format.
The main task,
refresh_and_upload
runs hourly. Currently it's running as a Kubernetes CronJob on my homelab Kube cluster (I'll talk more about that in another post).Netlify Lambda functions
12inch.reviews is hosted on Netlify, mainly because Netlify is amazing. It provides a seamless CI/CD pipeline, SSL, and AWS Lambda-like functions - all for free.
I use these functions to 'log in' a user via Spotify Oauth. I would have done this all on the frontend, except for the fact that Oauth requires a secret token and that can't be exposed on the frontend.
Since Spotify's access tokens are short-lived (1 hour max!) there is also a secondary function that will renew an access token seamlessly upon playback.
Once an access token is obtained, state is stored via the browser's
LocalStorage
API.The frontend
The frontend of 12inch.reviews is a relatively simple
create-react-app
single-page app, that provides search and sort functionality, as well as the ability to play any album using Spotify's web playback SDK.Pitchfork Spotify App Download
Getting all the album data
When you visit 12inch.reviews the first time, it will show the albums from a small JSON file called
initial.json
. This file includes only the first 25 most recent albums, so we have something to paint on the screen.Then, the rest of the album data will be backfilled in via a series of
fetch
es to retrieve all of the JSON files. I decided to partition each JSON file with 1000 albums, so there are 17 files altogether. Each album JSON file is at least 600k uncompressed, so there is probably room for more optimization here.After each JSON file is retrieved, they are stored in an IndexedDB on the frontend. Subsequent visits to 12inch.reviews don't require the large JSON payload - it will only load the delta payloads into the DB. I'm taking advantage of the fact that these reviews are immutable - once they are written they will never change.
Searching albums
Although IndexedDB is great for storing this data, there is currently no functionality to actually query IndexedDB like a regular database. So in order for 12inch.reviews to do searching and sorting, all of the data must be loaded into a simple javascript array.
Playing albums
I utilized Spotify's Web playback SDK to do the actual playing. It provides a series of hooks to use in order to initialize the player, and to do the actual playing.
I wrapped the actual playing into a simple class that ensures a refreshed access token is always provided.
![App App](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134139791/274018742.jpg)
The player component is one of the most complex react components in the app. Although the web playback SDK has its own state, I had to essentially 'sync up' the player component's state with the SDK's state. As with any type of synchronization, there are probably bugs keeping these 2 things in sync with each other.
The progress bar is clickable and utilizes some simple CSS animations to look and feel like a regular music progress bar.
IANA designer, but I was heavily influenced by Tesla's UX when designing the player component.
Criticism of Spotify's Web Playback SDK
My experience with Spotify's web playback SDK has been sub-par. The SDK does not have a
package.json
file, and therefore is not in the npm universe. There isn't an easy way to hook the SDK into a React or Vue app. This required a lot of manual syncing code that is probably hiding bugs.They have a public issue tracker on Github, but many of the issues don't have answered questions.
It's hard for me to understand who the target audience was for this SDK. I think it would benefit greatly from being open source and part of the NPM ecosystem. This would allow others to create wrappers for popular frameworks, which would allow me to remove my terrible syncing code.
Lessons learned + planned optimizations
This was a really fun project to work on. It took me about 6 weeks of coding, utilizing my 'side project hours' (roughly 5:30am - 7am on weekdays).
I learned a bunch of things:
- Tailwind.css
- IndexedDB
- Netlify Lambda Functions
- Spotify's APIs
12inch.reviews is a toy. It has enormous Can you upgrade to spotify premium on the app. shortcomings, mainly the fact that it needs to backfill nearly 20Mb of album review data in order to work well. This is insanely inefficient and wouldn't be appropriate for anything other than a personal side project site coded for educational purposes.
Pitchfork Spotify App Free
Other shortcomings:
Pitchfork Spotify App Music
- I don't feel like I leaned into Flow types as much as I could.
- Overall performance is still not great, as measured by Chromes Dev Tools.
- I should utilize a service worker to populate the indexeddb.
- Could create a GraphQL backend to do the data serving, to alleviate the need to bring all 20MB of data to the frontend.