Spotify Controller - a Spotify Connect Endpoint for the Sonos Kids Controller

About

This software provides a simple REST API to control a spotify device. It was developed to enable the Sonos Kids Controller (https://github.com/Thyraz/Sonos-Kids-Controller) to also work without a sonos device. Instead, it receives the original commands and sends them to a spotify connect enabled device.

As the REST API is compatible to a subset of the node-sonos-http-api this can be done without any changes to the Sonos Kids Controller itself. However, this slightly modified version https://github.com/amueller-tech/Sonos-Kids-Controller extends the frontend by the ability to chose among all available spotify connect players.

Installation

Ensure that you have Node.js and npm installed. Then install this software from Github:

wget https://github.com/amueller-tech/spotifycontroller/archive/main.zip
unzip main.zip
rm main.zip
cd spotifycontroller-main
npm install

Linking the application to your Spotify Account (Only needed once to obtain the initial token)

First you need to link the application to your spotify account and retrieve an access and a refresh token. This only needs to be done once, the software refreshes the access token (which expires every 3600s) automatically. For this purpose the auth program is used as follows:

1) Go to: https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/ and click "log in"

2) create an app and give it a name and a description

3) the Client ID and Client Secret are shown

4) click "edit settings"

5) add "http://localhost:8888/callback" to "Redirect URIs" and save

6) run the following command in a terminal: node auth.js "<Client ID>" "<Client Secret>"

7) in a browser go to: http://localhost:8888/login

8) log into spotify and confirm the requested permissions

9) the access and a refresh token are shown in the browser and you can close the auth program.

Configuration

Create the configuration file by making a copy of the included example:

cp config/config-example.json config/config.json

Edit the config/config.json file. The server port 5005 should equal to the port as defined in sonos-kids-controller. You can set the logLevel to "debug" to see some output when running the application

{
    "spotify": {
        "clientId": "as shown in the spotify dashboard",
        "clientSecret": "as shown in the spotify dashboard",
        "accessToken": "as shown in ther terminal from auth.js",
        "refreshToken": "as shown in ther terminal from auth.js",
        "redirectUri": "http://localhost:8888/callback"
    },
    "server": {
        "port": "5005",
        "logLevel": "error"
    }
}

Then start the software like this:

npm start

If all went well, you get get a list of available spotify connect devices by browsing to

http://localhost:5005/getDevices

Docker

You can easily run the application in a docker container. To build and start:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up

Configuring the Sonos-Kids-controller

There are no changes to the Sonos-Kids-Controller needed. Simply use the node-sonos-http-api part to configure the IP address and port of the spotifycontroller. Instead of specifying a room, add the ID of the spotify Connect device you want to control. You get the ID by going to http://localhost:5005/getDevices as described above.

{
    "node-sonos-http-api": {
        "server": "127.0.0.1",
        "port": "5005",
        "rooms": [
            "ID of your spotify connect device"
        ],
        "tts": {
            "enabled": true,
            "language": "de-de",
            "volume": "40"
        }
    },
    "spotify": {
        "clientId": "your_id",
        "clientSecret": "your_secret"
    }
}

Known issues - Some devices are not discoverable

You should get all Spotify devices on your local network by browsing to the following website:

http://localhost:5005/getDevices

However, some devices (Google Chromecasts, some SONOS devices) only show up in that list after they have been actively selected in the official Spotify App. This is no bug, but a "feature" by Spotify and described here:

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/guides/using-connect-web-api/#devices-not-appearing-on-device-list

Multiple tickets have been filed to spotify, but it seems like this is nothing they want to fix unfortunately.