Spotify skip pruner

A small script that watches what you play on Spotify and removes songs you keep skipping from playlists you choose. NB: NEEDS TO RUN ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER / SERVER

It polls the Spotify Web API (which reflects playback on any of your devices), and if you leave a song from a configured playlist before a set percentage has played, it counts one skip. When a song reaches your skip limit within a time window, it is copied to an archive playlist and removed from the source playlist. Archived songs are deleted after a retention period.

Features

• Per-playlist: Configure each playlist you want to be tracked and how you want to track them
• Only counts songs when playing from the correct playlist (keep context)
• Checks previous song, so back button does cause a skips (by default)
• Skips expire with a rolling window after a configurable number of days
• Removed songs go to an archive playlist before they are removed permanently for a custom time
• Dry run to log and setup
• Handles rate limiting and missed polls gracefully

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer
• spotipy (install with pip install spotipy in a virtual environment)
• A Spotify account and a free app from the Spotify developer dashboard

Setup

1. In your Spotify app. Add http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback as a redirect URI.
2. Copy config.example.toml to config.toml and fill in your client ID, client secret, archive playlist ID and the playlists to prune.
3. Log in once on a machine with a browser: python skip_pruner.py --auth. This creates .spotify_cache.
4. Run it: python skip_pruner.py

Keep dry_run = true until the log shows what you expect, then set it to false and restart.

Running on a server

Do step 3 on your own pc, then you can copy skip_pruner.py, config.toml and .spotify_cache to a server. Run it as a systemd service:

[Unit]
Description=Spotify skip pruner
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=USER
WorkingDirectory=/home/USER/spotify-skip-pruner
ExecStart=/home/USER/spotify-skip-pruner/venv/bin/python skip_pruner.py
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The config is only read at startup, so restart the service after editing it.