exportify: Overcoming "API rate limit exceeded"

Trying to export all my 315 playlists I quickly run into the message:

{
  "error": {
    "status": 429,
    "message": "API rate limit exceeded"
  }
}

Reading up on the limits I see:

Rate limiting is applied on an application basis (based on client id), regardless of how many users are using it.

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/user-guide/#rate-limiting

So I guess one easy way of overcoming the limit would be to fork (and host it at some other address I guess) and register it as my own application with spotify.

Do you think that is all there is to it? Looking at the code I see that exportify is doing it in batches of 20 lists at a time (I think). Would some waiting between each request help?

Another thing would probably be to implement some “wait and retry”-scheme for when these responses are recieved.

This is just a few loose ideas. I am adding the issue here to start the discussion since I saw some other user having the same problem somewhere. Exportify seems really great otherwise! Nice that you have taken the time to code this up.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 9 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 34 (8 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Add support for custom app client_id [#6] — committed to watsonbox/exportify by watsonbox 9 years ago
Add API rate limiting error message [#6/#7] — committed to watsonbox/exportify by watsonbox 9 years ago
Fix bug breaking use of app_client_id parameter [#6] — committed to watsonbox/exportify by watsonbox 9 years ago

Most upvoted comments

Yes I think you’re right that the easiest way to resolve this for now would be to use your own app client_id. To help with this, I’ve made a change which allows you to use your own client_id in the URL, so you won’t need to fork and modify the code.

To set up the app you need to:

Visit https://developer.spotify.com/my-applications/.
Click ‘Create an App’ and enter some details (anything will do).
Add this URL to ‘Redirect URIs’: https://rawgit.com/watsonbox/exportify/master/exportify.html.

Then you can use the client_id from that app as follows:

https://rawgit.com/watsonbox/exportify/master/exportify.html?app_client_id=[your client_id]

Update 30/11/20

Please replace https://rawgit.com/watsonbox/exportify/master/exportify.html with https://watsonbox.github.io/exportify/ in the above instructions since the app is now hosted on Github Pages.

+15

watsonbox on Nov 30, 2020

Dirty workaround adding a 500ms delay between API requests : https://gist.github.com/Alex131089/01611e017d874af51cb52ceefecc2d5d Using a dirty sleep function found on internet & may hang the browser (but still working & fetching actually), as I don’t know how to do this properly in JS / JQuery (async/event function call makes it a bit hard to introduce delay when you’re not used to). Managed to get my 192 playlists with that.

u1735067 on Jun 14, 2021

@jshebetich You’re right, I introduced a change which broke this. Fixed now plus a test to verify behavior. 7db76bf -@watsonbox

I’m still getting INVALID_CLIENT: Invalid redirect URI

kjvic on Sep 24, 2016

I moved to https://github.com/Alex131089/spotify-backup personally (forked from https://github.com/marpala/spotify-backup with more data retreived).

u1735067 on Jan 14, 2016