Spinitron Scraper

A Rust application that scrapes radio station playlists from Spinitron and creates Spotify playlists from them.

I made it because I love listening to KALX and wanted an easy way to pull music that i hear on the air into my Spotify library. I discovered that Spinitron powers their radio playlists feature, so I'm using that as the source of data to power this app.

When it runs, it first scrapes the list of all shows for the given station. Then it scrapes each show's playlist to get all spins over the past week, and updates a Spotify playlist to include all of those tracks (or at least the ones that it can find on Spotify). This repo has a github action that runs daily at 6 AM UTC to update the playlists for the stations configured in config.toml.

Playlists are created with the naming format: "Station Name - Show Name", like "KALX - Another Flippin' Sunday".

Claude Code wrote nearly all of this!

Usage

Basic Usage

# Build the application
cargo build --release

# Run with default config (scrapes yesterday's playlists)
cargo run

# Specify a different date
cargo run -- --date 2025-06-29

# Use a different config file
cargo run -- --config my-config.toml

Spotify Integration

Step 1: Get a Refresh Token

# First, set your Spotify app credentials
export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID="your_client_id"
export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET="your_client_secret"

# Run the Python script to get a refresh token
python scripts/get_spotify_token.py

Step 2: Use the App

# Set all credentials (including the refresh token from step 1)
export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID="your_client_id"
export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET="your_client_secret"
export SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN="your_refresh_token"

# Scrape and create Spotify playlists
cargo run -- --spotify --date 2025-06-29

Listing Playlists

# List all playlists as JSONL (requires Spotify auth)
cargo run -- --list-playlists

# Save JSONL output to a file
cargo run -- --list-playlists > playlists.jsonl

# Example JSONL output:
# {"station":"KALX","name":"KALX - Show Name","url":"https://open.spotify.com/playlist/abc123","track_count":25}
# {"station":"KPOO","name":"KPOO - Another Show","url":"https://open.spotify.com/playlist/def456","track_count":42}

Testing

# Run tests
cargo test

Configuration

Edit config.toml to specify which stations to scrape and which shows to ignore:

[stations.KALX]
# Example: ignore FREEFORM shows and test shows
# ignores = ["FREEFORM", "Test Show \\d+"]

[stations.KPOO]
# Ignore those generic KPOO San Francisco shows
ignores = ["KPOO San Francisco .*"]

[stations.KPFA]
# No ignores - scrape all shows

The ignores field accepts regex patterns to filter out unwanted shows. Shows matching any ignore pattern will be skipped during scraping.

Spotify Setup

1. Create a Spotify App:

   • Go to https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard
   • Click "Create App"
   • Fill in app name and description
   • Set the redirect URI to: http://localhost:8888/callback
   • Save and note your Client ID and Client Secret

2. Get a Refresh Token:

   • Set your client credentials as environment variables
   • Run the included Python script: python scripts/get_spotify_token.py
   • The script will open your browser and guide you through authorization
   • Copy the refresh token it provides

3. Set Environment Variables:

   export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID="your_client_id_here"
   export SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET="your_client_secret_here"
   export SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN="your_refresh_token_here"

Spotify Playlist Organization

Caching

The app uses two caches:

• HTML Cache: cache/ - Stores scraped HTML to avoid re-downloading
• Spotify Track Cache: spotify_cache/track_cache.json - Caches track search results with 14-day expiration

Automation

GitHub Actions

The repository includes a GitHub Actions workflow for automated daily playlist updates:

Setup:

1. Fork this repository to your GitHub account
2. Go to Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions
3. Add the following repository secrets:
   • SPOTIFY_CLIENT_ID - Your Spotify app client ID
   • SPOTIFY_CLIENT_SECRET - Your Spotify app client secret
   • SPOTIFY_REFRESH_TOKEN - Your refresh token (from scripts/get_spotify_token.py)

Workflow: The Daily Update workflow (.github/workflows/daily-playlist-update.yml) runs once daily at 6 AM UTC to update playlists and commit the markdown list.