I’m working with Python to fetch track details like artist names, song titles, and album info from my Spotify playlists through their API. Everything works fine for smaller playlists, but I run into issues when dealing with playlists that have more than 100 tracks since the API limits responses to 100 items per request.
I’ve been trying to handle this by making multiple requests with different offset values. My approach is to hit the endpoint /playlists/{playlist_id}/tracks and add ?offset=100 for the second batch, ?offset=200 for the third batch, and so on. However, when I make these requests, I keep getting the same first 100 tracks every time, regardless of what offset value I use.
Has anyone else encountered this problem? What’s the correct way to paginate through all tracks in a large playlist?
I had the same issue with large Spotify playlists. You need to set both offset and limit parameters in your API requests. The API defaults to 100 tracks from whatever offset you specify if you don’t set a limit. Use ?limit=100&offset=100 for your next requests to grab the next batch. Also check the next field in the response - it gives you a direct link to the next set of results, making pagination way easier. This works great for playlists that get updated frequently.
your API call’s probably missing the limit parameter with your offset. without it, Spotify just returns the default 100 tracks from the beginning every time. try requests.get() with params={'offset': 100, 'limit': 100} instead of building the URL manually - fixed the same issue for me with large playlists.
This is a super common issue with Spotify’s API pagination. The problem’s usually not the URL parameters - it’s the request headers getting messed up. Double-check you’re sending the auth header with every paginated request. Sometimes the token gets stripped between calls. Also make sure you’re not accidentally resetting your session or request object, which would bounce you back to page one. I’ve had better luck just grabbing the complete URL from the ‘next’ field in the response and using that directly instead of building the offset params myself. It handles weird edge cases better too, like when tracks get added or removed while you’re paginating through a playlist.
Had this exact problem scraping collaborative playlists last year. It’s not just about limit and offset - you’ve got to handle the response structure right. Check the ‘total’ field in your first response to see how many tracks exist, then calculate how many requests you’ll need. I noticed offset gets ignored if you hit the API too fast, so throw in a small delay between calls. Also, if someone modifies the playlist while you’re paginating, you’ll miss tracks or get duplicates. I started storing track IDs in a set to avoid duplicates when dealing with large collaborative playlists that change a lot.