Android Media Notifications
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If you are developing an Android application and want to know what is happening in the Spotify app, you can subscribe to broadcast notifications from it.

The Spotify app can posts sticky media broadcast notifications that can be read by any app on the same Android device. The media notifications contain information about what is currently being played in the Spotify App, as well as the playback position and the playback status of the app.

Enabling Media Notifications

The media notifications feature of the Spotify app may be disabled by the user for potential privacy concerns. For new or upgrading users of the Spotify app, this feature is disabled unless the user has enabled Facebook scrobbling.

It is not possible for your app to programmatically configure Spotify to enable broadcasting. If your app does not find any broadcast messages, consider showing the user a message asking them to enable this feature by turning Device Broadcast Status to ON in the Spotify app’s settings.

Event Types

The following type of events are sent with these respective intent extras:

A metadata change intent is sent when a new track starts playing. It uses the intent action com.spotify.music.metadatachanged, and contains the following intent extras:

Intent Extra	Type	Description
id	String	A Spotify URI for the track
artist	String	The track artist
album	String	The album name
track	String	The track name
length	Integer	Length of the track, in seconds

A playback state change is sent whenever the user presses play/pause, or when seeking the track position. It uses the intent action com.spotify.music.playbackstatechanged and contains the following intent extras:

Intent Extra	Type	Description
playing	Boolean	True if playing, false if paused
playbackPosition	Integer	The current playback position in milliseconds

A queue change is sent whenever the play queue is changed. It uses the intent action com.spotify.music.queuechanged and does not contain any additional intent extras.

In addition to the respective intent extras noted above, all broadcasts sent by Spotify contain an additional extra named timeSent (Long), which is the value of system.currentTimeMillis() at the time the broadcast was posted to the system. Since broadcasts can take a bit of time to propagate to your app’s BroadcastReceiver, this can be used to synchronize your app more precisely with the Spotify app. Also it is possible that the last value posted by Spotify is quite old, your app should account for this case if necessary.

Note that in some countries special licenses are required to display synchronized lyrics with music. Please make sure that your application abides by any such legal requirements.

Example

This example code shows how to read media notifications. For it to work, the app must first create a broadcast receiver which can be done in the AndroidManifest.xml file:


_12<receiver
_12    android:name="MyBroadcastReceiver"
_12    android:enabled="true"
_12    android:exported="true">
_12
_12    <intent-filter>
_12        <action android:name="com.spotify.music.playbackstatechanged"/>
_12        <action android:name="com.spotify.music.metadatachanged"/>
_12        <action android:name="com.spotify.music.queuechanged"/>
_12    </intent-filter>
_12
_12</receiver>

You can also register the broadcast receiver from in your Activity or Fragment (for more information about this, see the official Android documentation for BroadcastReceiver. Once the receiver has been registered, broadcasts will be sent to the class:


_37import android.content.BroadcastReceiver;
_37import android.content.Context;
_37import android.content.Intent;
_37
_37public class MyBroadcastReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {
_37    static final class BroadcastTypes {
_37        static final String SPOTIFY_PACKAGE = "com.spotify.music";
_37        static final String PLAYBACK_STATE_CHANGED = SPOTIFY_PACKAGE + ".playbackstatechanged";
_37        static final String QUEUE_CHANGED = SPOTIFY_PACKAGE + ".queuechanged";
_37        static final String METADATA_CHANGED = SPOTIFY_PACKAGE + ".metadatachanged";
_37    }
_37
_37    @Override
_37    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
_37        // This is sent with all broadcasts, regardless of type. The value is taken from
_37        // System.currentTimeMillis(), which you can compare to in order to determine how
_37        // old the event is.
_37        long timeSentInMs = intent.getLongExtra("timeSent", 0L);
_37
_37        String action = intent.getAction();
_37
_37        if (action.equals(BroadcastTypes.METADATA_CHANGED)) {
_37            String trackId = intent.getStringExtra("id");
_37            String artistName = intent.getStringExtra("artist");
_37            String albumName = intent.getStringExtra("album");
_37            String trackName = intent.getStringExtra("track");
_37            int trackLengthInSec = intent.getIntExtra("length", 0);
_37            // Do something with extracted information...
_37        } else if (action.equals(BroadcastTypes.PLAYBACK_STATE_CHANGED)) {
_37            boolean playing = intent.getBooleanExtra("playing", false);
_37            int positionInMs = intent.getIntExtra("playbackPosition", 0);
_37            // Do something with extracted information
_37        } else if (action.equals(BroadcastTypes.QUEUE_CHANGED)) {
_37            // Sent only as a notification, your app may want to respond accordingly.
_37        }
_37    }
_37}

Android Media Notifications Beta

Enabling Media Notifications

Event Types

Example

Android Media Notifications
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