Finally! That sums up how it feels right now. My third attempt at creating a Spotify Screensaver! [Read about #1 and #2] Jonas, Johan and me took a different approach this time and were much more successful. Now we have a Spotify app that sends information about what song is currently playing to our broadcaster, which sends it to all connected devices.
As you can see in the image, it opens up a whole new bag of tricks! Like communicating back to Spotify from other sources. We even did that! We made a small controller app that you can access from your phone for example.
So the flow’s like this: Start Spotify and our app. That will give you a link to follow for receiver clients that will show a nice visualization (like your TV and an iPad). It’ll also give you a link to the controller (like your phone). Then you’ll use Spotify just as usual. Queue songs, search for artists, play and skip songs, etc. PartySaver will keep the clients in sync. If you need the music to stop, just pull up your phone!
So there we have it! On my next party I’ll definitely use this and put on my iPad (next to the window) and on my TV. If I don’t like the song that’s playing, I’ll just change it from my phone.
Hopefully we’ll continue this next time and add more “party features”. Such as anyone being able to add songs to the playlist from their own phones. Or make alternative visualizations, like 3D thingies.
Update: We won the Spotify award at the hackathon! Yay!! We also got some interest from Deezer, so we might do something with that player too… 😉
JP's Journal 
Sounds pretty sweet! Now that you seems to got it working, when will you share the awesomeness with the world? 😀
Thanks! It currently only supports one person playing *lol* so it’s not useful yet. Also it’s a bit buggy when quickly changing songs back and forth hehe There’s probably gonna be a 4th iteration that’ll include some kind of user accounts. Then we’ll probably release something to the wild! 😀
I would love to get a download link for this 🙂
We’re going to the London Music Hack Day on 7-8 of December. Hopefully we have something we can release after that! 😉
Maybe a stupid question but do you have this up on github ?
I am very interested in how you solved this on the server side, a push teqnique via tcp socket?
Seems very cool and i will try this when it’s out 🙂
I usually put everything I do on Github, but this project is an exception. I’m not alone on it and we want to see where we go with it.
To answer your question, we’re using SignalR on the server. Jonas wrote that part so I haven’t checked exactly how it works. Checkout out SignalR and let me know if you have further questions!
Thanks for your support! I’ll blog after the 8th Dec.
Bit late on this, but do you have a download link for the chrome extension? Thanks!
Do you mean the bookmarklet that allows Spotify to run apps in fullscreen? It’s here. Spotify doesn’t support apps anymore though. Or did you mean something else?