Spotify Web API returns an error

[agavit]

Hi!
We are using Spotify Web SDK in our system, with the intention of playing the music within our web application. The player itself is opened in a different browser tab, and we need to control it through the API.

We create a playback device in the browser tab, then use its ID to control it. In the web playback, there’s an event ‘ready’, and through the event handler we get the new media device ID.

Then, when we want to activate the player, we are using ‘Transfer Playback’ call with the received device ID. However in many cases the call returns 404 (device not found) or 502 (bad gateway) errors instead of starting the playback. The success seems completely unpredictable – sometimes it works OK, and sometimes it does not. Repeating the call multiple times may help, but in many cases the errors persist, even though the player exists and is ready.

Running ‘Get Available Devices’ returns the device in question, is_active is true, is_private_session is false and is_restricted is false.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated:)

[tomjwatson]

I have exactly the same issue. It used to work perfectly but started behaving in the way you describe a couple of months ago. Completely makes my app unusable.

Did you ever manage to find any answer or workaround?

[tavvit]

Not yet. I have (on the same machine) one browser where if works OK (edge) and one browser where it consistently fails (chrome). Still did not find any real difference to shed the light on the behavior 😞

[tomjwatson]

I found that wrapping the call in a retry is a workaround that at least mostly works, though sometimes it will just consistently fail more times than I can reasonably retry. It looks like this is just something that is broken on Spotify's end.

[kruemeline]

I have the same issue. See my post here https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Spotify-Web-Playback-SDK-New-race-condition-....

[kruemeline]

Correction: Actually my issue is not quite the same, but almost the same. I'm using the play endpoint, not transfer playback. But the symptoms are the same.

[cenkay]

I have same issue on deviceSelect query (api.spotify.com/v1/me/player).

So disappointed that it returns "502 bad gateway." and doesn't provide any other information for debugging.

[agavit]

For some reason I could not reply earlier - would get a strange error from Spotify.
Anyway, we used retries, but more often than not the error was persisting for 20-30 retries with a second sleep between them, and we gave up. In any case, product-wise we can't wait for 30 seconds before the player starts.

[tomjwatson]

Yup this pretty much makes deploying any kind of player built on top of Spotify to production impossible.

[kruemeline]

The worst thing for us is that because the SDK updates itself, rather than being truly versioned, we cannot keep such a breaking change away from our prod stage.

[kruemeline]

Out of nowhere only 404s today, the playback SDK is completely broken for us. 😐

[JaimeMytaverse]

Hi All,

This is still broken for me. Any news?