More ways to discover music on Spotify with Tizonia 0.16.0

Tizonia version 0.16.0 codenamed “Bacares” is out with 94 commits, 161 files changed, 2695 insertions(+), 868 deletions(-).

This release primarily fixes a number of breakages in Google Play Music playlist and station search (#507, #515, #519, #522) that appeared a couple of months ago. These issues came around due to changes in some of Google’s internal APIs. The guys over at gmusicapi reacted very quickly and changed things at their end so that we can continue to enjoy playing the playlists and stations from this service.

In addition to these fixes, 0.16.0 also brings some new functionality for Spotify and an update for Google Play Music. These are the highlights:

Spotify recommendations by track, artist, and genre [NEW!]

tizonia --spotify-recommendations-by-track-id <track ID, URI or URL>

tizonia --spotify-recommendations-by-artist-id <artist ID, URI or URL>

tizonia --spotify-recommendations-by-genre <genre-name>

With these commands Tizonia returns instant playlists of around 100 tracks. To seed Spotify recommendations engine, you can either input a track ID, an artist ID or a genre name (e.g. ‘alt-metal’). These commands are a fantastic way to discover new music.

The Spotify id can have one of these three forms:

• ID: 1dfeR4HaWDbWqFHLkxsg1d
• URI: spotify:artist:1dfeR4HaWDbWqFHLkxsg1d
• URL: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1dfeR4HaWDbWqFHLkxsg1d

Spotify related artist search [NEW!]

tizonia --spotify-related-artists <artist>

This command searches Spotify for the specified artist and enqueues the top tracks (usually 10) from that artist and from 20 related artists. So with this command you should end up with an instant playlist of around 210 tracks of a similar music style. This command is great in combination with the --shuffle option.

Spotify featured playlist search [NEW!]

tizonia --spotify-featured-playlist <search-term>

With this command Spotify returns a small list of around 12 playlists. The playlists in the list change depending on the day of the week or even the time of the day. Try this once with some random search term (e.g. a single space, '_') to see what Spotify has in store at the moment, and then try once more with a refined search term.

Spotify new releases search [NEW!]

tizonia --spotify-featured-playlist <search-term>

With this command Spotify returns a small list of around 20 albums. Try this once with some random search term (e.g. a single space, '_') to see what new releases Spotify has on offer, and then try once more with a refined search term.

Search by Spotify track ID, artist ID, album ID, and playlist ID [NEW!]

These three new Spotify commands are available:

tizonia --spotify-tracks-id <Spotify track ID, URI or URL>

tizonia --spotify-artist-id <Spotify artist ID, URI or URL>

tizonia --spotify-album-id <Spotify album ID, URI or URL>

tizonia --spotify-playlist-id <Spotify playlist ID, URI or URL>

These are useful when the normal text-based search does not always return the track, artist, album, or playlist that you want. So at least an option is to find its id in the Spotify web service: https://open.spotify.com.

Remember that with tizonia --spotify-playlist-id you will need to specify --spotify-owner '<spotify-user>' if the playlist you are trying to listen to is owned by another user (i.e. it’s not one of your plublic playlists).

Recovering from spurious play token losses [NEW!]

Sometimes Spotify reports that the play token has been lost and the playback stops. There are a couple of new options to allow Tizonia to recover the play token and keep playing.

--spotify-recover-lost-token (a flag that can be added on the command line)

spotify.recover_lost_token = true | false (for a more permanent behaviour, add this to your tizonia.conf)

Google Play Music ‘activity’ search with ‘additional keywords’ [NEW!]

Until now it has been really difficult to locate an ‘activity’ station out of the stations returned by the Google Play ‘activity’ search option. This is now easier by filtering with an additional search term and the option --gmusic-additional-keywords

tizonia --gmusic-unlimited-activity "concentration" --gmusic-additional-keywords "piano"

Binaries and distribution

As usual CHANGELOG.md contains all the details.

Tizonia v0.16.0 is starting to hit the usual distribution channels:

• Bintray (Debian packages)
• AUR (Arch Linux)
• Snap Store.

Finally some great news on docker-tizonia. The repo is now up-to-date and fully caught up with the latest version of Tizonia. All thanks to its new maintainer, Josh Sunnex. Kudos to Josh!.

Credits

Thanks to those who have provided feedback via the project’s bug tracker on GitHub.

Coming up

Pandora support is currently work-in-progress:

• Pandora (#340)

Airsonic/Subsonic support has been requested:

• Airsonic/Subsonic (#496)