Enhancement: spotify-player widget for macOS

[iberniex]

Greetings.
I'm really new to open-source so critique me in anyway.

Feature Proposal

A macOS spotify widget for the plugin.
I have two ways to propose this feature

• using AppleScript to interact with spotify. There is a sample bash script I did below and works pretty well. Added it as a custom and here is how it looks like

• I also found spotify-player. A fast, easy to use, and configurable terminal music player. But doesn't have a command for displaying the current playback but could be used to enable custom keybindings for play, pause, next and previous instances.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Spotify status for Dracula tmux
# Displays current track with play/pause status (macOS only)

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

current_dir="$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)"
source "$current_dir/utils.sh" || { echo "❌ utils.sh missing"; exit 1; }

if [[ "$OSTYPE" != "darwin"* ]]; then
    echo "⏭️ Spotify (macOS only)"
    exit 0
fi

get_spotify_status() {
    local spotify_data
    spotify_data=$(osascript <<'END'
        tell application "System Events"
            if not (exists process "Spotify") then return "not_running"
        end tell
        tell application "Spotify"
            if player state is stopped then return "stopped"
            set t to "♪ " & artist of current track & " - " & name of current track
            if player state is paused then set t to "❚❚ " & artist of current track & " - " & name of current track
            return t
        end tell
END
    )
    case "$spotify_data" in
        "not_running") echo "Spotify not running" ;;
        "stopped")     echo "Spotify stopped" ;;
        *)             echo "$spotify_data" ;;
    esac
}

main() {
    local cache_file="/tmp/tmux_spotify_cache"
    local rate=$(get_tmux_option "@dracula-refresh-rate" 5)
    
    if [ ! -f "$cache_file" ] || [ $(($(date +%s) - $(stat -f%c "$cache_file"))) -ge "$rate" ]; then
        get_spotify_status > "$cache_file"
    fi
    cat "$cache_file"
}

main "$@"

Risks considered

New to applescript so not sure if it a good idea or not.
I was faced with a cache issue so I decided to create a cache file in tmp folder but I'm not really sure if it's a good idea.

Alternatives considered

I tried the spotify-tui but the package isn't being maintained so it was removed from brew and also using mpc is a hassle for me (maybe it's a skill issue).

[Theoreticallyhugo]

Hi iberniex,
thank you very much for your suggestions! I was aware that spotify-tui wasn't maintained anymore, but I didn't yet know it was gone from brew.
A couple of things come to mind:

• i don't know any apple script and might not have a machine to test it on in the not too distant future, so I probably wouldn't really be able to maintain this snippet. hence, whether or not we can maintain the apple script solution has to be decided by ethan i think.
• your spotify player idea sounds cool, but should probably be a separate pr and plugin
• do you think that your apple script could be done in such way that it works for a variety of media players? like setting a variable that id like to see playback by spotify, safari, and tidal, where the apple script would then, e.g. in a loop, check whether any of these run and then display the playback it found?
• I like your proposals and would gladly test them as two separate PRs
  cheers
  hugo

[iberniex]

Hey @Theoreticallyhugo ,

I will gladly do the PRs. Based on:

• The AppleScript plugin
• The spotify_player plugin

• i don't know any apple script and might not have a machine to test it on in the not too distant future, so I probably wouldn't really be able to maintain this snippet. hence, whether or not we can maintain the apple script solution has to be decided by ethan i think.

Considering your comment on this matter, I did some digging and found a reliable way to recover the precise playback using the spotify_player package ( I kinda lied there is a way to get the playback with this ).
It actually supports various instances of spotify like browser, desktop and also with the terminal.

I tried it for some time and found out that there are latency issues.

# Before the additions

$ time sp get key playback |  jq -r '.item | "\(.artists | map(.name) | join(", ")) - \(.name)"'

Pitbull, Kesha - Timber
spotify_player get key playback  0.14s user 0.04s system 4% cpu 3.614 total
jq   0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 3.613 total

You have to run the daemon feature provided and add your own spotify client_id from spotify in order for it to work.

# After the additions

$ time sp get key playback |  jq -r '.item | "\(.artists | map(.name) | join(", ")) - \(.name)"'

Aqua - Barbie Girl
spotify_player get key playback  0.01s user 0.01s system 59% cpu 0.020 total
jq 0.00s user 0.01s system 48% cpu 0.018 total

So I found it precise to just use the spotify_player package and it's maintained.

• like setting a variable that id like to see playback by spotify, safari, and tidal, where the apple script would then, e.g. in a loop, check whether any of these run and then display the playback it found?

Based on this, I can set a flag to check for other media players like Music.App, VLC and spotify, but it might be tricky for the browser and tidal.

• After some research, with the browser it would require injecting to the DOM and it would be really hard cause some apps on their browser apps they obfuscates their DOM.
• For Tidal, there is no local playback documentation and there is no applescript support at the moment but I found a guy who did some stuff but its from four years ago so will research on it while I do the PRs