Tune is a Spotify browser and remote application with a focus on performance and integration with other services.
You can see it in action at https://tune.fullyforged.com.
In many ways Tune copies the official Spotify application: many views (e.g. search or details for artists and albums) are tightly based on the equivalent sections in the Spotify application. This is an intentional choice aimed at reducing friction between applications.
Tune differs in these areas:
- Performance: Tune is extremely light, as for the most part is a server-rendered application, which makes it suitable to use on a wide range of devices and operating systems (think Linux on a Raspberry PI). Most of its functionality works without JavaScript and is exposed via a proper URL.
- Integration: Tune tries to connect items like artists, albums or songs to other sources of information, so that for example you can use convenient links to read the history of a band on Wikipedia.
- Recommendations: Tune offers suggestions based on a combination of what's provided by Spotify and some custom logic (loosely based on what you've been listening in a specific time period). The logic is an almost direct porting of how I search for new music, so it might not work for you.
Due to limitations imposed by Spotify, users with free subscriptions cannot use the embedded audio player, nor they can control other devices via Tune's UI. If you have a free subscription, those UI elements are not visible as they're ineffective.
For users with Premium subscriptions, Tune can be used as a standalone player by selecting the appropriate option in the device switch section in the mini player (note that only some browsers are supported).
First of all, we need working installations of Elixir and Erlang. The
recommended way to achieve this is via asdf. Once
it's installed and working, you can run asdf install
from the project root to
install the correct versions required (see the .tool-versions
file for
details).
Next, make sure you setup the required environment variables as detailed in
.env
by copying the file to .env.local
and adjusting values as needed.
Please see the Vapor docs for more detail on the dotenv configuration provider.
To create secrets, (e.g. for SECRET_KEY_BASE
), use mix phx.gen.secret
.
Next you can install all dependencies with mix setup
.
- Start the application with
mix phx.server
- To start the application and an IEx console connected to it, use
iex -S mix phx.server
Now you can visit localhost:4000
from your browser.
You can run tests with mix test
, dialyzer with mix dialyzer
and Credo with mix credo
.
The project is setup to deploy on Heroku, please make sure you:
- configure environment variables
- add the buildpacks detailed at https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html
- to enable exception tracking via Sentry, make sure you define a
SENTRY_DSN
environment variable
The Tune
namespace defines the domain logic responsible to interact with the
Spotify API and maintain running sessions for each logged-in user.
The TuneWeb
namespace defines authentication endpoints and the main
LiveView
(TuneWeb.ExplorerLive
) that powers the entire user interface.
Tune assumes multiple browser sessions for the same user, which is why it
defines a Tune.Spotify.Session
behaviour with Tune.Spotify.Session.Worker
as its main runtime implementation.
Each worker is responsible to proxy interaction with the Spotify API, periodically poll for data changes, and broadcast corresponding events.
When a user opens a browser session, TuneWeb.ExplorerLive
either starts or
simply reuses a worker named with the same session ID.
Each worker monitors its subscribers, so that it can shutdown when a user closes their last browser window.
This architecture ensures that:
- The amount of automatic API calls against the Spotify API for a given user is constant and independent from the number of user sessions for the same user.
- Credential renewal happens in the background
- The explorer implementation remains entirely focused on UI interaction
The application exposes TuneWeb.Telemetry
module with definitions for relevant metrics.
An instance of
Phoenix.LiveDashboard
is mounted at /dashboard
. In production, the endpoint is protected by basic
auth (see .env
for relevant environment variables).
-
If you use Tune in combination with official Spotify clients, you will notice that if nothing is playing, after a while the miniplayer controls stop responding and you can't even play any song. This is due to a quirk in the Spotify devices API, which reports client devices as still connected.
If you're running Tune on a platform where it can load the built-in audio player, you can just refresh the page for the player to reload, which has the side effect of "waking up" all other clients as well. At that point, you can select them from the device switcher and resume normal operation.
If you're running Tune on a mobile device, your only option is to open the dormant client application, do a quick play/pause to wake it up and go back to Tune.
More information on the related Spotify documentation page.
- Mini player icons from Bootstrap Icons
- Wikipedia icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
- Last.fm icon made by Pixel perfect from www.flaticon.com
- YouTube icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com