Looking back, I’m really happy that I used web scraping for my Spotify embeds, seems to be quite resilient. This post has a track that doesn’t work on Spotify anymore, yet the embed still works fine. This isn’t a guarantee though, one day it will break, but not today. That’s why I am thinking about downloading all Spotify assets, so if it works now, it’ll work forever. It always feels hard to add these kinds of things while trying to stay minimalistic… maybe I should.

I am still looking for another way to integrate some kind of music embed. Maybe with Navidrome, since I’m currently using that for my ever-growing offline music library. I could share a track and then scrape that share to make an embed, that would work the same way Spotify works for now. Would work with a minimal amount of code, which aligns with the philosophy of this blog. But there are two small problems with this: having a full-length song publicly available (basically illegal distribution) and It depends on the Navidrome server and that specific share never going down. I could make the share low quality so people wont download it, but this is not a perfect fix.

This is running form a share on my Navidrome instance, it works: (KLOUD - DEFECT)

Another solution is using a custom music library management tool (which I am planning on making, soon™) that exports a music snippet to be upload in the media management of MB (automatically or manually) and a piece of html that will become the “embed”. I could already do this now manually, but I want to keep posts low-friction and this would help. It’s an almost perfect solution, no changes for MB and none of the Navidrome problems.

But a lot of code is needed for that music library management tool first. So it won’t be soon, while I could bang out the Navidrome solution in an evening or two. Maybe I should first make MB download all Spotify assets to lock them in place forever (I know it’s against the TOS but IDC). Still, it would increase the complexity of MB. It can’t be perfect, but what’s more important… I am going to download them, can’t trust Spotify with anything.