Changelog

1.16.0

Reliability release. Three plugin bugs and one upstream API migration.

Fixed

• Authentication failed when the Web viewer core plugin was enabled. The login URL was opened with window.open, which Web viewer intercepts — the consent page loaded in an in-app view that cannot follow the obsidian://spotify-auth/ redirect. Login now goes through the system browser, with a copy-link and a paste-the-redirect-URL fallback. See Known issue.
• Auto-login never ran on a default install. A disabled context-menu entry aborted plugin startup before the session was restored, so the status bar stayed on “Spotify not Connected” until Refresh session was run by hand. Context menu toggles now also apply without reloading the plugin.
• Playlist commands failed with no message at all. Create individual files for all playlists had no error handling: when the call failed, no folder, no file and no notice were produced, and the reason was only visible in the developer console. Every command now reports failures.
• Playlist folders were not created for nested destinations, and a Playlist destination pointing at the vault root produced a bogus folder path. Missing parent folders are now created.
• Errors said nothing useful. Obsidian’s requestUrl throws on any 4xx before the plugin can read Spotify’s response, so the existing scope hints never ran and users saw Request failed, status 403. Failures are now mapped to actionable messages naming the failing call, the missing scope, and what to do — see Troubleshooting.
• The authorization URL is now correctly percent-encoded.
• “No song is playing” is reported as such instead of “Unable to get the currently playing track”.

Changed — Spotify API migration

Spotify migrated Development Mode apps on 9 March 2026 (changelog, migration guide). Every plugin user runs such an app, so the plugin moved to the current endpoints:

• Playlist contents are read from /playlists/{id}/items instead of the removed /playlists/{id}/tracks.
• Saved-track checks use /me/library/contains instead of the removed /me/tracks/contains.
• Playlist track counts read items.total instead of tracks.total.

This restores {{ playlists }} and {{ playlist_track_count }}, which had been silently returning nothing.

Deprecated

The following render _deprecated_ when Spotify returns no value for them, which for most accounts is always. They are kept so existing templates do not start printing raw {{ ... }} text in notes, and will be removed in a future release:

{{ popularity }}, {{ followers }}, {{ track_popularity }}, {{ album_popularity }}, {{ album_genres }}, {{ album_genres_array }}, {{ album_genres_hashtag }}, {{ audio_preview_url }}

Artist genres ({{ genres }} and friends) still work, but Spotify only classifies some artists — an empty result is missing upstream data, not a plugin failure. See Genres — best effort.

Where Spotify does still return a value it is rendered as before. The /albums/{id} request is still made only when a template uses one of the album variables.

Note

Development Mode apps now require the app owner to hold an active Spotify Premium subscription. Without it, every request fails with 403 regardless of plugin settings.