No playlist support you say?

The release of Remoteless has been a huge success compared to our initial expectations. With this success a lot of people have given us feedback regarding play-lists, and we have also received many low ratings because of the low play-list support in Remoteless. In this short blog-post I will try to shed some light at why this feature is missing.

Adapted from kio over at flickr (click image)

BTW We totally agree that play-list support would make Remoteless a better remote. No doubt about it.

As mentioned in our blog post about the Spotify Metadata API, the metadata API doesn’t have any playlist support. It is possible to search for albums, get tracks on albums and these kinds of things, but no playlist information is available.

We have access to some information directly from the Spotify Client, but this is by far not enough to make a useful feature. In a file called ‘guistate’ in the Spotify settings folder it is possible to find the URIs of the play-lists, but not the names of the play-lists, and not the tracks.

There really is NO WAY to get this information right now.

But what would we need?

In order to give a good play list integration we would at a minimum need to know the tracks in the playlist. We would need the URI, and also the name of the playlist. We could simply integrate this so that browsing a playlist would be just like browsing an album on Remoteless. Implementing it would be simple and would be done in a few weeks.

From our feedback we found that even if the current import feature is cumbersome, people do it, and since it’s only done once it’s not a very big problem. What people really are complaining about is that its impossible to browse the playlist tracks, so we might do something with the ‘guistate’ URIs in the future, but currently it’s not enough to make it a solid, useful feature.

In our view there is really only one alternative to the play list support dilemma, and that is that Spotify adds playlist support to the metadata API. This way it would take us (and every other Spotify integrator) a couple of days with development to give you full playlist support trough the remote. We don’t know why Spotify did not include this into the metadata API, but we hope to see it soon. We really really want to make Remoteless as good as possible, and if we could deliver playlists tomorrow, I promise you that we would stay up all night to get it done.

To help, please tell Spotify that the metadata API needs playlist support NOW!