Spotijack

⚠️ Spotijack will not work on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) because Audio Hijack Pro no longer runs. There is an experimental build on this branch that removes the need for Audio Hijack Pro.

Spotijack is a macOS application that automates recording songs playing in Spotify using Audio Hijack Pro. When Spotify changes track, Spotijack starts a new recording in Audio Hijack Pro and updates the recording metadata.

Piracy

This is a fun side-project I made which I've used to develop my skills (AppleScript, some advanced Objective-C and Swift, unit testing). I've published it to showcase my development skills. I'm assuming nobody's going to actually use Spotijack because there are far more efficient ways of getting music. I'm not publishing binaries to discourage people from using Spotijack.

Requirements

Spotijack requires macOS 10.14. You need a licensed copy of Audio Hijack Pro (version 2, not 3) and any recent version of Spotify. You (probably) need a premium Spotify account since Spotijack makes no attempt to distinguish between adverts and songs.

Spotijack has only been tested using the instant-on plugin for Audio Hijack Pro. You'll also need a copy of Audio Hijack 3 to get the plugin.

Usage

On first launch, Spotijack will handle creating a recording session in Audio Hijack Pro as well as setting up Audio Hijack Pro and Spotify for scripting. All you need to do is start playing a song in Spotify and hit the record button.

Building

Spotijack uses Carthage to manage dependencies. Once they're set up, it should build cleanly using Xcode 10. You should do a release build because the optimisations provide a nice reduction in CPU usage.

Implementation

Spotijack is the perfect example of an over engineered side project. Spotijack is split into two parts, the GUI application Spotijack and the library LibSpotijack.

LibSpotijack contains the core recording and application management logic. It features a suite of unit tests (unit, not integration!) and, in theory, can be used in other applications. Spotijack is really just a GUI wrapper around LibSpotijack.

LibSpotijack doesn't do anything fancy to track recordings. It communicates with Spotify and Audio Hijack Pro using the ScriptingBridge framework which is so much fun to work with in Swift (or Objective-C for that matter). LibSpotijack just polls Spotify to see if the current track has changed and if it has, it starts a new recording in Audio Hijack Pro. Nothing fancy.

Old Versions

Originally Spotijack was just a simple AppleScript I wrote one afternoon. Over the years however, I've rewritten Spotijack as a native Cocoa application using the ScriptingBridge framework.

I have included the original AppleScript versions in the Legacy directory. There's a changelog available in the changelog.md file. It's pretty sparse since I didn't consider releasing this until 2015.

License

Spotijack is licensed under the MIT license.