I started playing with the Spotify App API of few weeks ago. I wanted

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Asked: June 8, 20262026-06-08T17:11:54+00:00 2026-06-08T17:11:54+00:00

I started playing with the Spotify App API of few weeks ago. I wanted

0

I started playing with the Spotify App API of few weeks ago.

I wanted to change the volume. This should be done by using the volume property of the Player class, as stated in the documention:

volume Get or set the current volume level as a float between 0.0 and 1.0.

Unfortunatly it turned out that this volume property can only be used to get the current volume, but not to set the volume.

So I began searching the web to find some information. I found two related posts on stack overflow 1 and 2.

So what do I ask the same question as two other people you may ask.

Well, I’ve gone a little deeper into the Spotify API and found some useful information. I hope this post will help the Spotify developers.

Also, stackoverflow seem to be the way to go to post bug report for Spotify.

So let’s jump into my Spotify App API investigation. All of this is done by using the Inspector.

The volume property is defined in the Player class. The Player class is defined in the models module. So lets have a look to models, for this we open the file models.js (“Scripts” tab in the inspector, select “models.js” in the dropdown menu). We first find this (line 743) :

* @property {number}      volume               Get or set the current volume level as a float between 0.0 and 1.0.

So let’s have a look to this volume property then (lines 889-892 in models.js):

volume: {
    get: sp.trackPlayer.getVolume,
    set: sp.trackPlayer.setVolume
},

Ok. So now we now that we can set the volume by using the setVolume method in trackPlayer.
Let’s go deeper and see what’s inside trackPlayer. For this, type in the console:

_getSpotifyModule("trackPlayer")

It returns an object containing a lot of functions. Here is a little snapshot:

_getSpotifyModule("trackPlayer")
    Object
    ...
    getShuffle: function getShuffle() { [native code] }
    getVolume: function getVolume() { [native code] }
    playTrackFromContext: function playTrackFromContext() { [native code] }
    ...
    setShuffle: function setShuffle() { [native code] }
    skipToNextTrack: function skipToNextTrack() { [native code] }
    ...

Has you can see the function getVolume is defined. But the function setVolume is not.

So here is my conclusion: as of now it is not possible to use Player.volume to set the volume because the setVolume function is not define in trackPlayer.

I hope that my work will help the developers to solve this problem.

In [1], IKenndac suggested that:

you’re only allowed to change the volume if your app initiated the playback that’s occurring

But this turned out to be wrong, I made a little application to test it : https://gist.github.com/3152875 .

You can also try to execute the following code in the console, and you will see that the volume does not change:

var sp = getSpotifyApi(1);
var models = sp.require('sp://import/scripts/api/models');
var views = sp.require('sp://import/scripts/api/views');
var player = models.player;

player.volume;
player.volume = 0.5;
player.volume;

[1] Change volume with spotify App API
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11230630/change-volume-in-a-spotify-app