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My Daily Drive

Daily Drive

Bring back Spotify's Daily Drive — your personal mix of podcasts and music, updated automatically.

Spotify killed Daily Drive on March 17, 2026. This project brings it back. It runs on any Linux machine and automatically refreshes a Spotify playlist with your podcasts interleaved with music.

Listen to a live example — updated twice daily with NPR News, The Journal, Freakonomics, and a mix of top tracks and genre discovery.

You need Spotify Premium. Since Feb 2026, Spotify requires Premium for Developer apps. It's free to use the API — you just need a Premium account.

Setup Guide

Step 1: Create a Spotify Developer App

This tells Spotify your script is allowed to manage your playlists. It's free and takes 2 minutes.

  1. Go to developer.spotify.com/dashboard and log in with your Spotify account
  2. Click "Create App"
  3. Fill in the form:
    • App name: Daily Drive (or anything)
    • App description: Personal playlist tool (or anything)
    • Redirect URI: type in exactly: http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback then click Add
    • Check both Web API and Web Playback SDK
  4. Click "Save"

You're now on your app's dashboard page.

Finding your Client ID and Client Secret

  1. On your app's page, click "Settings" (top right)
  2. You'll see your Client ID right there — copy it somewhere
  3. Click "View client secret" to reveal your Client Secret — copy that too

Adding yourself as an authorized user

  1. Still in Settings, scroll down to "User Management"
  2. Type in the email address tied to your Spotify account and click Add

Why? Since Feb 2026, even the app owner must be explicitly added. Without this, you'll get a 403 error when the script tries to update your playlist.

Step 2: Create an empty playlist in Spotify

  1. Open Spotify (the app or open.spotify.com)
  2. Create a new playlist — name it whatever you like (e.g., "My Daily Drive")
  3. Right-click the playlist → Share → Copy link to playlist
  4. You'll get a link like: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/34nCFkIuIkiFF4W5dJKiTi
  5. The part after /playlist/ is your Playlist ID — copy it

Step 3: Find your podcast IDs

For each podcast you want to include:

  1. Open the podcast/show in Spotify
  2. Click ⋯ → Share → Copy link to show
  3. You'll get a link like: https://open.spotify.com/show/6z4NLXyHPga1UmSJsPK7G1
  4. The part after /show/ is the Show ID

Some popular ones to get you started:

Podcast Show ID
NPR News Now 6BRSvIBNQnB68GuoXJRCnQ
The Daily (NYT) 3IM0lmZxpFAY7CwMuv9H4g
Freakonomics Radio 6z4NLXyHPga1UmSJsPK7G1
Up First (NPR) 2mTUnDkuKUkhiueKcVWoP0
The Journal (WSJ) 0KxdEdeY2Wb3zr28dMlQva

Step 4: Install and configure

# Get the code
git clone https://github.com/patdeg/dailydrive.git
cd dailydrive

# Run the installer (installs Node.js if needed + dependencies)
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Now edit your config file:

nano config.yaml

Paste in your Client ID, Client Secret, Playlist ID, and your podcast Show IDs from the steps above. The file has comments explaining each field. Save and exit (Ctrl+X, then Y, then Enter).

Step 5: Log in to Spotify (one time only)

npm run setup

This prints a URL. Open it in your browser, log into Spotify, and click Agree. The script saves your login token locally — you only do this once.

On a headless server (SSH, no monitor)? Connect with port forwarding first:

ssh -L 8888:127.0.0.1:8888 user@your-server

Then run npm run setup on the server, and open the URL in your local browser.

Step 6: Build your playlist!

npm start

Open Spotify — your playlist is now filled with a fresh mix of podcasts and music!

Personalizing Your Music Mix

This is where you make it yours. Edit config.yaml to control what music goes in.

Your Top Tracks (on by default)

Pulls from your most-played songs — the best signal for "songs I actually like."

music:
  top_tracks:
    enabled: true
    time_range: "short_term"   # "short_term" (~4 weeks), "medium_term" (~6 months), "long_term" (all time)
    count: 30

Add genre discovery (new music you'll like)

Add genres to discover fresh tracks that match your taste:

music:
  genres:
    - pop
    - indie pop
    - dance pop
    - singer-songwriter

Don't know your genres? Run npm run taste:google to auto-detect them using AI for free (requires a Google Gemini API key in .env — see Taste Profile below). Or use npm run taste for the Demeterics version.

When both top tracks and genres are enabled, songs are split 50/50 — half familiar favorites, half new discoveries.

Pull from existing playlists

music:
  playlists:
    - name: "My Chill Playlist"
      id: "your-playlist-id-here"

Control the mix pattern

The mix_pattern controls how podcasts (P) and music (M) alternate:

Pattern What it sounds like
PMMMM 1 podcast, 4 songs, repeat (default)
PMMM 1 podcast, 3 songs, repeat
PM alternating podcast and song
MMMPMMMM music-heavy: 3 songs, 1 podcast, 4 songs

Pin a podcast to always play first

Great for news briefings:

podcasts:
  - name: "NPR News Now"
    id: "6BRSvIBNQnB68GuoXJRCnQ"
    episodes: 1
    position: first    # Always plays first, before the pattern

Run It Automatically

Set up a cron job so your playlist refreshes on its own:

crontab -e

Add this line (refreshes at 4 AM and 4 PM daily):

0 4,16 * * * cd /home/$USER/dailydrive && /usr/bin/node index.js >> /tmp/dailydrive.log 2>&1

That's it — your Daily Drive is back on autopilot.

Commands Reference

Command What it does
npm run setup Log in to Spotify (one time, or if token expires)
npm start Build/refresh the playlist now
npm test Dry run — shows what would happen without changing anything
npm run taste Auto-detect your music genres using AI (Demeterics)
npm run taste:google Auto-detect your music genres using AI (Google Gemini — free)

Troubleshooting

Problem Fix
Not authenticated! Run npm run setup
config.yaml not found! Run cp config.example.yaml config.yaml and edit it
Token expired Run npm run setup again
403 Forbidden Go to developer.spotify.com/dashboard → your app → Settings → User Management → add your Spotify email. Then re-run npm run setup
404 Not Found Double-check your podcast/playlist IDs in config.yaml
Playlist is empty after running Run npm test to see if podcasts/playlists are returning results

Taste Profile

Auto-detect your genre tags using AI. The script analyzes your Spotify listening history and suggests genre tags for your config.

Option A: Google Gemini (free — recommended)

Uses the Google Gemini API free tier. No credit card required.

  1. Go to aistudio.google.com/apikey
  2. Sign in with your Google account
  3. Click "Create API key" and select or create a Google Cloud project
  4. Copy the key (starts with AIza...)
  5. Create a .env file in the dailydrive folder (or add to your existing one): 
    GEMINI_API_KEY=AIza...your_key_here
  6. Run: 
    npm run taste:google

Free tier limits: 15 requests/minute, 1M tokens/day — more than enough for this.

Option B: Demeterics

Uses the Demeterics API — an LLM observability platform that acts as a proxy to 50+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, etc.). Beyond routing, Demeterics tracks cost, latency, and errors across every call with 50+ fields per request — useful if you're building AI into multiple projects and want one dashboard to monitor spending and performance. Integration is just a URL change (OpenAI-compatible), and prompt-level tags let you slice data by app, workflow, or customer. See demeterics.ai/observability for details.

  1. Get an API key at demeterics.ai
  2. Add to .env: 
    DEMETERICS_API_KEY=dmt_your_key_here
  3. Run: 
    npm run taste
Mode How Fee
BYOK (default) Store your vendor keys (OpenAI, Google, etc.) in Settings > Provider Keys. Or use dual-key format: dmt_YOUR_KEY;sk-YOUR_VENDOR_KEY 10%
Managed Key Demeterics provides vendor keys. Email sales@demeterics.com with subject "Feature Access Request" 15%

How It Works

  1. Auth: OAuth 2.0 — setup.js runs a local server, you log in via browser, tokens are saved and auto-refresh
  2. Podcasts: Fetches latest episodes from each show via Spotify API
  3. Music: Pulls from your top tracks, genre search, and/or playlists — pools, shuffles, and trims
  4. Mix: Pins episodes marked position: first, then interleaves the rest using your mix pattern
  5. Update: Replaces the playlist contents via the Spotify API

The script caches state in state.json — if nothing changed since last run, it skips the update. Delete state.json to force a refresh.

Background: What Was Daily Drive?

Spotify launched Your Daily Drive on June 12, 2019 — a personalized playlist mixing music with news and podcast clips. It typically had ~25 items (19 songs + 5-6 podcast segments), updated multiple times daily. The feature was fully removed on March 17, 2026.

This project brings it back — but better, because you control exactly what goes in it.

Contributing

PRs welcome — especially for:

  • Additional music sources (liked songs, recently played, etc.)
  • Multiple playlist support
  • Web dashboard
  • Docker support

License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.

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Recreate Spotify's killed Daily Drive — auto-mix podcasts and music into a daily playlist

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