Discord Rich Presence for Youtube Music activity

Concise Firefox web extension and Golang server for updating your Discord activity with songs playing on Youtube Music. Works on all operating systems.

How to use

1. Download the source code
2. Go to about:debugging in FireFox
3. Select This Firefox > load Temporary Add-on and select the directory containing the web extension (i.e extension
4. Ensure Discord application is started (not the browser version)
5. Ensure Golang version >= 1.22.5 is installed
6. Start the Golang server by building go build ./gobackend/main.go and running the executable (e.g: ./main after building on Linux)
7. Go to https://music.Youtube.com/* and start any song
8. Your Discord rich presence should now be updated

How it works

• Golang backend connects to Discord using IPC and listens on an end-point for active song metadata data.
• The web extension uses a MutationObserver to send updates to the server when the "pause-play" button changes (indicating a pause, seek-forward, seek-backward or a new song starting event)

Considerations

• Why not connect to Discord directly through the Firefox extension?

  • (Firefox) extensions are sandboxed to increase safety in cases of malicious or malfunctioning code. This means they cannot freely access the Discord IPC socket located in the operating system filesystem. read more about it here

• Why not use mediaSession.setActionhandler() instead of MutationObserver?

  • Using the setActionHandler() would be the "proper" way to implement an event based update model. However, on Firefox the required APIs (start, stop, etc) seemed to not be supported, (even if the official documentation states elsewise?)

Limitations and potential improvements

• Extension only sends an update if the Youtube Music browser is actively open
  • This happens due to browser optimizations; MutationObserver does not detect a change in HTML as the HTML is not actively changing
• Firefox extension requires permissions on <all_urls> (See manifest.json).
  • Technically the extension only requires access to the server endpoint (e.g: http://127.0.0.1:8080/song-data), but the extension received a network error when <all_urls> was removed (not sure why?)
• Firefox extension has to be manually reloaded each time the browser is reset
  • This happens as the Extension is not available on the Firefox marketplace.
• Ads
  • Ads are currently not filtered when creating the rich presence, this is a nice issue to solve if anyone is interested.

Motivation

This project was patched together to:

1. Orientate in Golang
2. Better understand all technologies used
3. Create a simple Discord rich presence alternative for listening on Youtube Music