music-ui

Novel ways to control music playback without losing your flow.

Overview

Did you ever open your phone to change what's playing on Spotify, only to be distracted by a notification about a new podcast, or an email from your accountant! music-ui supports using dedicated software or hardware to change what's playing without losing your flow.

Use cases:

• Running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign
• Cooking, gardening, coding
• Hosting a party

The app has been used for:

• playing Spotify playlists by placing different Lego character figures on the back of a mobile phone. (The lego figures have RFID tags under their bases).
• choosing Spotify playlists in a console window without leaving VSCode.

The philosophy is to keep each dedicated UI simple. For example, play a mood/genre , skip to next track, stop playback. For finer control, whip out yor mobile and use the the existing Spotify apps, and don't forget to text your mother back!

Installation

1. Install Poetry if you don't have it already.
2. Clone this github repo.
3. From the app's root folder (same as repo root), poetry install to install dependencies.

Configuration

Core app configuration

See config.py for configurable elements and their allowed and default values.

The configuration values are loaded from (in order of precedence):

1. command line arguments
2. environment variables
3. TOML configuration files
4. the defaults in config.py

So, for example, command line arguments will override environment variables.

Command line arguments are in the format --<argname> <argvalue>, for example, --log_level DEBUG, --web.enabled true.

Environment variable names require a prefix of MUSICUI_, for example MUSICUI_LOG_LEVEL is converted to log_level. A dot is used for nested names, for example, MUSICUI_WEB.ENABLED is converted to web.enabled.

TOML file configuration requires this structure in your home directory:

├── .musicui
    ├── config.toml
    ├── secrets.toml

An example config.toml file:

log_level = "DEBUG"

[web]
enabled = true
port = 8811

[spotify]
redirect_uri = "https://my-cool-music-app.com"

Spotify configuration

Register an app on Spotify for Developers.

music-ui uses Spotipy, which is a Python wrapper for the Spotify Web API. Authentication is via Spotify OAuth2 so music-ui needs values for your Spotify app's:

• client_id
• client_secret
• redirect_uri

They can be supplied to music-ui in the same way as other music-ui configuration (see above). If using TOML files, put the client_id and client_secret in the secrets.toml file because they are sensitive fields.

See the Spotipy documentation for more details on those values.

Music mood and UI configuration

Edit musicui/moods/moods.py to map your own mood_ids to console keys and playlists.

If using console mode (see below) also need to edit the input prompts in musicui/console_app.py in the take_input function.

Usage

Console mode

Start the console application with python -m music-ui

Then use predefined keyboard keys to play music from your predefined moods/playlists, or to skip to next track.

Web mode

python -m music-ui --web.enabled true

Then hit these endpoints from your own UI hardware/app:

• /mood/play/<mood_id> where <mood_id> is a mood_id you configured in musicui/moods/moods.py
• /next to skip to next track.

Roadmap

• Stop/resume playback. A must-have feature on any device that controls noise.
• Multiple threads - to handle input from hardware controls built on Raspberry Pi
• Music sources other than Spotify

Contributing

Feel free to create an issue or submit a PR.

Seeking assistance with:

• unit/integration testing. How to mock service dependencies (Spotipy), and simplify or abstract functions to make them easier to test.

License

MIT. Please respect the Spotify for Develpers terms of use.