Fangirl helps me keep track of all the releases from my followed artists on Spotify. It creates a playlist of recent releases. Here's an example of one it made:

Spotify has a section for tracking some releases, but the method they use to construct that list is opaque, and seems to be missing some releases sometimes. Perhaps most importantly, if you don't listen to them all immediately, you may miss a release from a favorite artist. There's some other issues too, e.g., you can't simply play all of them in one go, or you can't remove them once you've finished listening to them and either decided to save it to your library or not.

Putting all the releases into a playlist under your account fixes lots of these problems however. fangirl does this.

fangirl is dumb simple:

$ fangirl --help
Usage of ./fangirl:
  -blacklist string
        a path to a blacklist file containing artists to skip
  -duration duration
        the duration to consider 'recent'; defaults to 1 month (default 744h0m0s)
  -playlist string
        the name for the playlist containing recent releases
$ fangirl -playlist releases
> Generates a playlist, named "releases", containing all releases in the last month.
$ fangirl -playlist releases -duration 8928h
> Same as above, but gets releases put out in the last year.

Note that the -duration flag takes in a duration that is in the format of Golang's time.Duration.

Of course, you need Spotify developer credentials to run fangirl. fangirl looks in the environment for credentials. In particular, it looks for:

• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID - For the Spotify client ID.
• SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET - For the Spotify client secret.

You can make your own at the Spotify developer dashboard.

NOTE When making this app, make sure to set the callback URI to http:https://localhost:8080/callback.

Upon initial start-up, fangirl will request you to visit an OAuth2 page. fangirl hosts the callback URL you set in the dashboard, and will get the necessary privileges to execute. On the next start-up, fangirl will re-use the credentials it got from last time.

⚠️ In other words, fangirl caches credentials (see below in the Considerations section). If this is too insecure for you, you've been warned. Feel free to file an issue or PR that makes this behavior optional.

fangirl is just a pure Go program:

$ go build

There's a few pieces to fangirl's behavior that are worth pointing out explicitly:

• fangirl is not fast. To do what it does, we need to issue hundreds, if not thousands of API requests to Spotify. Furthermore, to avoid rate-limiting, we then have to throttle that. Personally, I run fangirl in a monthly cron job.
• fangirl will always create a new playlist, even if an identically named playlist already exists. It will not append.
• fangirl will not add releases that you've already liked. However, if you've listened to it and don't like it, a subsequent invocation will possibly add the release again, since fangirl does not know if you've listened to the song already. Hopefully, you follow artists you mostly like, and so most releases will be liked.
• fangirl emits logs during execution detailing what it is doing. However, fangirl explicitly separates its read operations from its final write operation of creating the playlist. This means that a failure prior to playlist creation will not create incremental work.
• The playlist name isn't exactly honored. See the screenshot for additional information fangirl appends to the name.
• fangirl does not handle cases where a playlist size exceeds 10,000, which is the maximum playlist size. It is fixable by overflowing into multiple playlists, but it isn't something I've personally faced. Open an issue if its a problem for you. Otherwise, I'll fix it if I ever need to.
• On initial run, you'll have to go through the OAuth2 flow. Afterwards, fangirl will save the OAuth2 token in your cache directory. On Unix, that's likely going to be ~/.cache/fangirl/.
• fangirl defines a "release" as an album that is either a typical album, a compilation or a single.