Slack Spotify
Slack Follows Spotify in Pursuing Direct Listing Route While the process is seen as riskier than a traditional IPO, the collaboration and messaging platform company has little to worry about.
How it all started
We’re using Slack extensively here at @Boldare, it seems that everyone does. Recently,I’ve noticed that if you paste a Spotify link to Slack, it gets converted to a Spotifywidget. What’s more, you can control your fully-local, desktop Spotify app from there!How come?! Let me show you the steps that I took in order to find the true answer.
Listen to God Of Thunder - Slack on Spotify. Slack Song 2003. Jonathan Prince, the Spotify executive who helped lead the company’s ill-fated policy against “hateful conduct” last year, has left the company to join the work-flow platform Slack. Download Slack for free for mobile devices and desktop. Keep up with the conversation with our apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes.
Take the wrong path
A fellow suggested that the Spotify widget in Slack exploits the concept of customprotocol handlers (see here).
Let’s check it then! I’ve found an example of Spotify-protocol string (spotify://track:2wXBasaRrlX9gRTV5qPAbb),typed it into Firefox address bar and… it launched a second Spotify application.It didn’t connect with already running instance at all, just spawned a new one.
That’s not what I was looking for!
Find the widget
Keyboard laptop acer. Another fellow suggested that it might be useful to play around with Spotify’s play button,which could potentially work similarly as Slack’s widget (they indeed look similar).
I’ve found a demo button hereand verified that it is also able to control the running desktop application! Hey,we’re in a normal browser here, so let’s launch developer tools!
After you play Carly Rae Jepsen’s Run Away With Me, you can notice a couple of entriesin the network log! Hooray!
What’s the 127.0.0.1:4381 host? Let’s take a closer look at one of the requests :)
Opera download for windows xp 32 bit. As you may have noticed, this request is received by the local Spotify webserver.More precisely:
- the app exposes HTTP port 4381,
- request path is
/play.json, - request parameters contain data about the song/album to be launched and someadditional security-related parameters (CSRF, oauth).
Slack Spotify Integration
We found it!
More info to extract
If you were curious about the data the app returns to the widget, take a look atthis JSON snippet.
How To Play Spotify On Computer
Slack Spotify
There’s a multitude of interesting data, such as the track we’ve been currently listening,volume set, some player settings and the version of the application.
I hope you liked this quick investigation!