After sitting on the project for a few months, I’ve just released the next version of Spotijack on GitHub, as well as the application’s source code. This is the first public version of Spotijack because I’ve spent a while contemplating whether the project is OK to release.

Spotijack is a utility for the Mac that automates the process of recording music playing in Spotify with Audio Hijack Pro. Whenever the song changes in Spotify, Spotijack tells Audio Hijack Pro to split the recording and update the new recording’s metadata. Obviously the program enables piracy which I do not support, and this is why I’ve sat on it for so long.

I wrote the first version of Spotijack back in December of 2011. At this point it was a simple AppleScript with no user interface and a lot of bugs. After that I didn’t touch the project for another two years, largely because I didn’t use it. In 2013, looking for a new side project, I started working on Spotijack again. I ported the application to Cocoa-AppleScript (a horrible experience) and gave it a proper user interface. In 2014, I then rewrote the application in Objective-C using the ScriptingBridge framework (a mostly non-horrible experience). Ditching AppleScript made the project much more fun to work on. As a result, I started adding new features and fixing bugs just for fun. I started to treat it like a proper project and wanted to make the code public.

I’m aware that the application’s only real use is for music piracy but, it’s a fairly inefficient way of pirating music. I don’t think anybody will actually use Spotijack because there are far more efficient ways to get music. So, I don’t think I’m doing much harm by releasing Spotijack and treating it as a little side project.