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  • Can we please get a "Current song playing" API endpoint?
Okay, this has been bothering me for a bit. I was recently "flexed on" by visiting Discord and seeing a bunch of Spotify Rich Presence on peoples profiles. I got into researching for a Deezer alternative, at least something that displays the current song, and I found nothing.



To anyone that doesn't know: Discord is a messaging app that has grown quite popular(think of it as a Skype replacement), and lets you display stuff on your profile, like if you're playing a game or listening to music. Most programs/services have either a 3rd party rich presence app or provide it themselves.



There isn't even an API endpoint for the current song playing and its info. Now I don't want to play an armchair developer, but I was very disappointed I couldn't even make my own Discord rich presence because a music service cannot provide me with the current song playing through their own API.



My tone may seem a bit harsh, but I've been resorting to using a 3rd party app that saves their songs in an SQLITE3 database, and I'm planning on getting the current song from there with C and write my own simple Discord rich presence.



Some of you might now use Discord and might find this completely unnecessary, but I'm mostly making this thread because of the lack of endpoint, not just lack of Discord rich presence.



What the API endpoint would probably need(the bare minimum):


  • Title of the current song, artist, album, album artwork link
  • Status(paused/playing/...)
  • Time(3:30/4:20)

Other things you could achieve with that endpoint:




  • Rich presence on every other thing that provides it with a very tiny memory footprint and overhead(who needs a GUI for that???), which further exposes Deezer to the younger demographics
  • 3rd party clients that would fill up some of the niche markets, first thing I can think of is a terminal client? People make that and other people like it, doesn't cost anyone nothing

One more disclaimer. I am aware of the "workaround" with the Javascript SDK. However I find this completely unnecessary as that limits everyone's options, and something as simple and permanently running in the background does not need a javascript SDK.



If I missed something somewhere, go ahead and contact me.



Once again I apologize for possibly sounding either confrontational or rude. I just want this endpoint, and not rely on 3rd party software for the fun little programs/scripts I like to make in my free time. I would never make this thread if I haven't seen a thread on StackOverflow that's 3 years old and has the problem of that missing endpoint.

What’s on the desktop app that’s not on the web app? Like usually the desktop app is lacking and not the other way around. Like, Flow just vanished the last time I used it.

Mostly the speed and offline mode

Ok but offline mode has to be the only thing, i just compared the speed of both and it’s honestly neglectable or not even there. It’s not like the desktop app isn’t also just a chromium package. But you can contribute or fork the app and play with it the way you probably can’t with the official client. That’s why I posted it.

So here is where the lack of a current song API is really affecting me. I took the decision to move from Spotify to Deezer for many reasons and I am struggling today to set it all up. On of the things I did with Spotify is live scrobble what I'm playing on the app to my lastfm. This is then picked up by something called Pixelchat which creates a live widget of what I'm playing including album art etc and I can display that as a browser source on my live Twitch stream. This allows all my viewers to see what song is playing instead of asking all the time. 

 

It works seamlessly with Spotify, instantly updating any song I’m playing. But with Deezer it only updates after the song has finished or I move to another track (therefore it’s always displaying one track ago rather than live). 

 

This is actually a big deal for me and I’m disappointed after what looks like the OP suggesting this 3 years ago it hasn't moved on. Rethinking my choice to move if I am honest now. I don't want to be tied to using a web browsing scrobbler as it picks up everything including youtube videos etc so it can mess with what's displayed on my stream.

 

Come on Deezer, sounds like a currently playing integration to Lastfm is something a lot of people would like for varying reasons.

Hello, another user here who just moved from Spotify and struggling with Deezer for very similar reasons to what is being discussed above.

My big frustration with it so far is very suboptimal integration with Last.fm (see here if you are curious to see what are the major flaws with it https://support.last.fm/t/deezer-scrobbling/177). I thought I could easily build something myself then. I gave for granted that there was a "now playing" API that I could easily use and after looking for 30 minutes with no luck at your APIs I landed here and I am very disappointed to see that this has been requested by 70+ people for the last 4 years and it has simply been neglected by the development and product team 😔

I really want to like Deezer and, in fairness, there are a few things that are even better than Spotify (flow and music discovery in general), but the landscape of integrations and APIs really seems quite neglected. And that's a shame because in 2024 I'd argue that having a music system that's easy to integrate everywhere is not just a nice to have feature but IMHO something expected by users and it might make it break the entire product/company.

I am already tempted to switch back to Spotify just because of this even though I am trying really hard to find a viable alternative...

It seems they just don’t have any idea how much this is really easy to make compared to how many people would be happy about it.

Their leadership has no vision on how much Deezer users are flexed by other platforms, specially spotify and how much would devs like me want to make tools that would just spread the word of deezer for everyone.

Do not follow the same path that microsoft edge is… They made an incredible Chromium based browser, then started not listening to their users, now they are on the downfall again.

Don’t forget that technical users are the most loyal of them all.

TERMS OF USE DEEZER COMMUNITY SITE