At some point in the past couple of weeks, Soundcloud support seems to have stopped working (on a Pi). Tracks and URLs that used to play fine now lead to messages like the following in mopidy.log:
WARNING [1371:Core-13] mopidy.core.tracklist: Track is not playable: soundcloud:song/Queen - Another One Bites The Dust (La Royale Edit).23580077
Occasionally the above message is preceded by:
INFO [1371:SoundCloudBackend-3] mopidy_soundcloud: 'A2 - Young Pulse - Don't You Know, Baby - [L.T.D. - Don't Cha Know]' can't be streamed from SoundCloud
That INFO message is about 1 in 10 and may be a red herring.
What’s going on?
I am using the mopidy-soundcloud fork at https://github.com/JC3/mopidy-soundcloud, which is the latest version of the soundcloud extension plus support for playing sets.
So far my only working theory is that soundcloud changed their streaming audio codec or container or something. Various evidence supports this but I do not know how to verify. Any help on this front would be appreciated.
Non Mopidy soundcloud players are also having a similar issue on the pi, but not on Android or ios devices, which further lends support to a missing codec or something.
That “can’t be streamed by soundcloud” message comes from mopidy-soundcloud when it cannot find the ‘streamable’ flag in the data that’s returned by the soundcloud API. It does sound like they (soundcloud) have changed something.
When I searched earlier I found something about them removing the streaming API and forcing everyone to use their embedded player. But the source for that was some guy on twitter rather than an official soundcloud announcement.
So randomly, just now, almost as if they knew we were talking about it, the “track is not playable” SoundCloud tracks began working again. This is both good because it’s nice when things work, and bad because it happened in the middle of me just getting in to diagnosing the issue, which at least for now is no longer reproducible.
I know it wasn’t something unique to this particular Pi or network; we saw SoundCloud playback begin failing at the same time in the past week and then just now resume on ~10 devices in 5 different locations, and also it looks like somebody else here presumably ran into the same issue (I can’t get mopidy-soundcloud to play anything). Also it didn’t seem to be related to the SoundCloud users’ track settings; these tracks were from multiple users, including myself, and I know at least that I did not mess with anything on my SoundCloud account while this was going on.
Very weird. It almost feels like some dev at SoundCloud silently broke something by accident then fixed it.
Hopefully it was just a temporary screw up on their part. The alleged termination of the streaming API was from https://github.com/ToneDen/toneden-sdk/issues/83