Lights Out

Lights out! Guerrilla radio! Turn that s*** up!

- Rage Against the Machine

Lights Out is a tool to convert radio station online playlists into Spotify playlists.

Usage

You can install Lights Out using pip:

$ pip install lightsout

Before you can use Lights Out for the first time, you'll need to register an application with Spotify. To do this, visit the Spotify Developer portal and provide some application details. In return, you'll get two credentials: a SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID and a SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET.

Then, create a file called .lightsoutrc in your home directory. This file should contain your two Spotify credentials:

SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID='<your credentials here>'
SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET='<your credentials here>'

Substitute your own credentials as appropriate.

Then, you can run Lights Out:

$ lightsout -u <your Spotify username>

Substitute your own spotify username as appropriate.

If this is the first time you have run Lights Out, you'll be redirected to a browser, prompted to log into your Spotify account, and authorize your application. This will redirect to the localhost:8888 URL you specified as the redirect URL for your application. Your browser won't be able to load this page - but that's OK - all you need is the URL. Copy the URL, and paste it into the console window where Lights Out is running.

Once you've done this, Lights Out will pull down the data for the playlist, search Spotify for tracks matching the songs on the playlist, and construct a Spotify playlist for those songs.

Options

There are a number of options you can also pass to lightsout:

• You can specify a station other than doublej using the -s option:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -s triplej
  

  See --help for the list of available channels

• You can specify the starting date/time for the playlist search with the -d option. If you specified:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -d '2016-05-01T10:30:00+0800'
  

  the search would be for 10:30 AM, May 1 2016, AWST.

• You can specify the size of the playlist window. By default, searches will be for 24 hours, but you can specify any length in hours with the -l option. For example:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -l 4
  

  would generate a 4 hour playlist.

• You can specify that you want to append to an existing playlist using the -p option:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -p 7wkac9khk9ssablyH9kRsC
  

  You can find the list of existing playlists by specifying LIST as the playlist:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -p LIST
  

• If you want to maintain a perpetual playlist (a playlist that is replaced, rather than appended to), you can specify that playlist using the -P option:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -p 7wkac9khk9ssablyH9kRsC
  

  If you want to update a perpetual playlist, but not append to an existing playlist, you can specify -p NONE in addition to -P:

  $ lightsout -u <your Spotify username> -p NONE -P 7wkac9khk9ssablyH9kRsC
  

Extending Lights Out

Lights out currently has support for the following stations:

• ABC Australia
  • Double J
  • Triple J
  • Unearthed
  • ABC Classic
  • ABC Classic 2
  • ABC Jazz
  • ABC Country
  • ABC Extra

To add a new station station, you need to add a single function to lightsout/backends.py. This function takes two arguments: a start datetime and an end datetime. The function must return a list of dictionaries, each dictionary describing a single track:

[
    {'track': 'Paranoid Android', 'artist': 'Radiohead', 'album': 'OK Computer'},
    {'track': 'mogwai fear satan', 'artist': 'Mogwai', 'album': 'Young Team'},
    {'track': 'Brennisteinn', 'artist': 'Sigur Rós', 'album': 'Kveikur'},
    ...
]