[Feature] Playlist example

[atschwarz]

Hey,

first I want to say thanks for this nice stuff! I'm new to ruby and tried to play with your api wrapper. First I looked at the examples, which all run fine. Then I tried to extend the login example by listing all playlists of a user, but I always receive a null pointer using "Spotify.session_playlistcontainer($session)". Calling this on the console example, it looks as followed:

[5] pry(main)> Spotify.session_playlistcontainer($session)
=> #<Spotify::PlaylistContainer::Retaining address=0x0>

After many hours trying to get it working, I gave up. So my question: Can you code a small example, which lists the playlists of a user? That would really be a nice feature :-)

Best regards and thanks in advance!

[Burgestrand]

Hi!

I’ve done this earlier, a long long while ago, so I hacked together something this morning, thinking “How hard can it be?”.

It turns out the libspotify API for doing this is a bit tricky. There are a few nooks and crannies to be cautious about:

• There is no proper user lookup API. If you know somebody’s Spotify classic username, you are generally able to create a Spotify URI for them in the form of spotify:user:<username>. This link can be used to create a handle for a user in libspotify.
• If a user has signed up through Facebook, their Spotify username will be their Facebook user ID. The Spotify URI for this user is the same as above, with their Facebook ID instead of their username in the link. This makes it cumbersome to find people that have signed up through Facebook with the libspotify API alone!
• There is no way to know when a playlist container (the object containing somebody’s published playlist) has loaded completely. Because of this, the example I commited will simply poll on the number of playlists in the container once it’s been reported loaded by libspotify, and if after 4 checks no more playlists have been found in the container, the example assumes there will be no more playlists and the container has been fully loaded.
• Some playlists do not have a name, such as your Starred playlist and your Top Tracks playlist.
• Your own starred playlist (for the user you are logged in as) cannot have it's link retrieved the regular way.

I believe that’s about all the weird things I found while writing this example.

Welcome to Ruby, hope you enjoy it. :)

[atschwarz]

Hey Kim,

many thanks for this very detailed explanation. I tried your example and that is exactly what I want to do. Now, ruby and its FFI stuff becomes slowly clearer :) Maybe my approach to learn ruby on the basis of this is not the best, but sometimes a good way is to jump in at the deep end. :)

Up to now, I love ruby :-D Only choosing the right IDE distress me. Coming from Java with Eclipse, I'm currently using Aptana RadRails. But not sure, if this is the right choice.

Again thank you very much and best regards, andi

[Burgestrand]

@astahlhofen I cannot help you much with the choice of IDE, most people in Ruby do not use one from my experience. Instead it is a combination of favorite editor (common favourites: sublime text, textmate, vim, emacs), a terminal window, and maybe a browser if doing web development. We don’t focus as much on IDE like Java with Eclipse or IntelliJ.

I would suggest to you the #ruby and #ruby-lang IRC channel on freenode, it was a long time since I was on it but there are usually very helpful people in there that help answer questions and discuss much ruby in general! :)