When should a device be visible (active)?

[janek]

Thank you so much for making Spotify accessible via API, I'm very grateful to be able to use it!

I'm building an alarm clock that starts to play music at a specified time, from Spotify. For playback, I use a Raspberry Pi that's constantly connected to my music system. The Spotify client I use on it is raspotify, and it's also running the whole time.

At some point I send a request to the Spotify API to play from that specific device. It works 80% of the time; and when it doesn't, it breaks with 404: Device not found. The device, however, is clearly visible from the Spotify app. If I use the app to play something on it only for a moment, I can then use the Web API to play on it again.

I would love to never get this error and just have the same visibility of the device from the API as I can experience in the Spotify app. But I can also probably hack around it somehow, if I know what the behaviour is, for example something like the following:

• how does visibility from API differ from visibility from Spotify desktop?
• is there a rule for how long a device "lingers" after the last time it was performing playback?
• is there an endpoint in the API that would extend this linger time without disrupting playback, if playback is happening on another device?

I looked through the documentation and was not able to find anything, pardon if I missed it. Thank you for your time!