HowTo: Node Red – Control Spotify from NodeRed

What I really appreciate about Spotify is its good connectivity. You can play or control music or podcasts on another device with just a few clicks.

Thanks to the free option to set up developer access, you can also access many of these functions from NodeRed. With a few cleverly linked nodes you can easily create your own “Spotify remote control” for (for example) the dashboard.

Of course, the control options are not limited to the dashboard. For example, you could also trigger the control option via connected buttons or other options. 🙂

You can find an initial approach to this in the following article.

Requirements

Helpful articles:
So that you can install new nodes, NodeRed should of course already be installed.
How to prepare a RaspberryPi and then install NodeRed on it is described in the following articles.

The following three articles describe what needs to be done to prepare the RaspberryPi:

• RaspberryPi – setup for nerdiys!
• RaspberryPi – The first configuration!
• RaspberryPi – Control the RaspberryPi via SSH
• NodeRed – Installing NodeRed on the RaspberryPi

Required tool:
-no-

Required material:

In the following list you will find all the parts you need to implement this article.

Log into the NodeRed configuration interface

Before you can edit your NodeRed configuration, you must - if activated - first log into the NodeRed configuration interface.

thanksgiving

First of all, thank you gelo2002 for his flow. The NodeCode offered below is based on its freely shared code. I just added a few (in my opinion useful) extensions. But gelo2002 did the main work. 🙂

You can find information about his flow here:
https://gist.github.com/gelo2002/1727790dfc3f6bac8c5b39f5a952b804
or here
https://flows.nodered.org/flow/1727790dfc3f6bac8c5b39f5a952b804

Activate Spotify Devloper account

In order for you to be able to control the various functions of your Spotify account, you must first set up a developer account for your Spotify account. This costs nothing and can be done with just a few clicks. 🙂

To do this, go to the homepage of your Spotify Developer Portal. You can do this using the following link:

https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/

After logging in with your account details, you must first accept or confirm the “Terms and Conditions”.

Then click on “Create App”…

...and enter a name and a suitable description. You can choose both as you like, but of course they should be reasonably meaningful. 🙂

You will then be redirected to the overview of this “app” (this is what Spotify calls the developer accesses that have been set up). There you will already find the “ClientID” and the “ClientSecret” on the left side. You will need both later than you have already written down.

After you have clicked on “Edit Settings” in the overview, you will be directed to the view shown. You now have to enter the appropriate “Redirect Uri” there. This redirect Uri depends on the address of your NodeRed server.

For example, this is at the address https://server.fritz.box reachable, the redirect Uri would be as follows:

https://server.fritz.box:1880/spotify-credentials/auth/callback

Make sure that you select the correct protocol (i.e. http or https).

Once you have entered the correct link, all you have to do is click on “Add” and (further down) on “Save”.

Insert NodeCode

Now to the actual NodeCode. This includes the control of the simplest functions in the form below. So you can pause and resume playback, select the next or previous track, scroll through the song and also see the album cover.

As always, you can find the NodeCode in the following part and also in the Nerdiy Git repository at:

• https://github.com/Nerdiyde/NodeRedSnippets/blob/master/snippets/spotify_control.json

Enter account access data in NodeRed

After you have created developer access to your Spotify and inserted the NodeCode, you can now switch to your NodeRed configuration. Click on one of the Spotify nodes and start configuring a new access there.

Now you have to enter your ClientID in the text field next to “ClientID” and your Client secret in the text field next to “Client secret”.

You can find both in the previous step in your Spotify Developer access.

Next you have to enter the desired “Scopes”. Scopes represent the services that you want to control from NodeRed.

For this flow you can enter the following scopes:

streaming user-follow-modify user-read-currently-playing user-modify-playback-state

You can find a complete list at: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/authorization/scopes/

As soon as you have entered the scopes, all you have to do is click on “Start Authentication”.

This will open a new window in which you will now have to confirm that you allow your NodeRed to access your Spotify account.

If you receive an error message at this point, you can find a solution in the paragraph “Solution for error “INVALID_CLIENT: Invalid redirect URI”. 🙂

After you have confirmed this, you will be redirected to a website where only the short message “spotify: authorized” will be displayed.

Solution for “INVALID_CLIENT: Invalid redirect URI” error

I found the solution to the error message: INVALID_CLIENT: Invalid redirect URI here: https://github.com/pckhib/node-red-contrib-spotify/issues/16

In principle, the error is caused by the fact that the “Redirect URI” was not previously configured correctly in the developer account. To get the correct redirect URI, you can use the following trick.

Enter your URI into the URL decoder (https://www.urldecoder.org/) and let it decode.

The marked part in the lower field then corresponds to the redirect URI, which you must enter in your Spotify account.

Spotify playback sometimes jumps or stalls

Every now and then it happens that the playback on one of my devices (no matter which one) jumps or stalls. Through testing, I found out that this seems to be related to the linking of the Spotify account with external services (for example the NodeCode presented here).

In retrospect, I explain it like this: Because Spotify wants to keep the playback data synchronized on all connected participants, I can imagine that a participant who responds too slowly could disrupt this synchronization.

Long story short: If you also notice this error: For me it helped to restart the computer on which NodeRed is running or, in the “worst case”, to unlink the Spotify account.

Have fun with the project

I hope everything worked as described for you. If not or you have questions or suggestions please let me know in the comments. I will then add this to the article if necessary.
Ideas for new projects are always welcome. 🙂

PS Many of these projects - especially the hardware projects - cost a lot of time and money. Of course I do this because I enjoy it, but if you think it's cool that I share the information with you, I would be happy about a small donation to the coffee fund. 🙂