Get current song playing in Spotify on iPhone

Question

Accessing the MPMusicPlayerController.systemMusicPlayer() (code below) works for getting track info for what\'s playing in the Apple Music app, but is there a way w

Answer 1

The Apple Documentation states there are two types of music player:

• An application music player plays music locally within your app. It is not aware of the Music app’s now-playing item, nor does it affect the Music app’s state. There are two application music players: applicationMusicPlayer and applicationQueuePlayer. The application queue player provides greater control over the contents of the queue and is the preferred player.
• The system music player employs the built-in Music app on your behalf. On instantiation, it takes on the current Music app state, such as the identification of the now-playing item. If a user switches away from your app while music is playing, that music continues to play. The Music app then has your music player’s most recently-set repeat mode, shuffle mode, playback state, and now-playing item.

The first is only within your app and the second is the Apple Music app, since you can't reach out of your app's sandbox in a normal app this is not possible in App Store apps.

If however you still want to create your idea you can develop this on a jailbroken device. This github project has an easy example of how to get the current playing song in a jailbreak tweak. If you want to try it, this is an excellent, be it a bit old, still accurate tutorial on how to get started developing tweaks.

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Update

I just ran into this Spotify SDK that will let users login and play the users Spotify music. This way the music stream will be inside your app and you have access to all info in the applicationMusicPlayer. The downside is that this will be a lot more work to set up than just getting the information about Spotify's playing track and the user will have to play his music from your app instead of the Spotify app.