Rebase on the lastest librespot library

[rockynox]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I am unable to initiate playback from a macOS on Spotify. When I select my Rpi with Hifiberry from my Mac, the Vollibrespot extension crashes. (see the logs below)

This issue is known and is in the process of being resolved on the most active librespot repo. (something linked with the authentication)
However, I noticed that Hifiberry relies on older versions of Vollibrespot and librespot from a repo that is no longer maintained.
Is there a specific reason why the librespot-org repo was not chosen?

Thanks !

Describe the solution you'd like
To be able to initiate playback using Spotify from any device.

Describe alternatives you've considered
It's working if I initiate playback from an iOS first (authentication works from there) ans then control it from macOS.

Additional context
Here are the logs that helped me trace the issue:

vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Country: "FR"
Jan 13 15:37:07 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Metadata pipe established
Jan 13 15:37:07 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Event: Volume { volume_to_mixer: 32767 }
Jan 13 15:37:07 lalabox python3[440]: ERROR: vollibrespot - Don't know what to do with vollibrespot v0.2.4
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Fetching autoplay context uri
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Event: SessionActive { became_active_at: 1705160228022 }
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : SessionActive!
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Event: PlaybackStarted { track_id: SpotifyId { id: 41050848205632260281109145437504365545, audio_type: Track } }
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Event: PlaybackLoading { track_id: SpotifyId { id: 41050848205632260281109145437504365545, audio_type: Track } }

⬇️
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : error 403 for uri hm://keymaster/token/authenticated?client_id=##############&scope=streaming,user-read-playback-state,user-modify-playback-state,user-read-currently-playing,user-read-private
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Error: MercuryError
⬆️

Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Autoplay uri resolved to <"spotify:station:playlist:37i9dQZF1DZ06evO1vjXFQ">
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : Resolving uri "spotify:station:playlist:37i9dQZF1DZ06evO1vjXFQ"
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: thread 'main' panicked at 'cannot poll Map twice', /home/matuschd/buildroot-4/host/share/cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/futures-0.1.31/src/future/map.rs:35:29
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: stack backtrace:
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    0:       0x5566648ed8 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    1:       0x556666eb98 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    2:       0x5566645dd8 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    3:       0x5566648d24 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    4:       0x556664a194 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    5:       0x5566649f84 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    6:       0x556664a684 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    7:       0x556664a54c - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    8:       0x55666492e4 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:    9:       0x556664a2b0 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   10:       0x55661d1d70 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   11:       0x55661d1d3c - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   12:       0x556635d438 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   13:       0x556626f938 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   14:       0x556622e038 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   15:       0x5566225d60 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   16:       0x55661fa370 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   17:       0x55661ee744 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   18:       0x55661f5dd4 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   19:       0x55661edb90 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   20:       0x556622f234 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   21:       0x556621311c - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   22:       0x5566213660 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   23:       0x556663f664 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   24:       0x556622f89c - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   25:       0x7fbd5d73a0 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   26:       0x7fbd5d7498 - __libc_start_main
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   27:       0x55661d2330 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]:   28:                0x0 - <unknown>
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox vollibrespot[806]: [Vollibrespot] : EventSender disconnected
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox systemd[1]: spotify.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=101/n/a
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox systemd[1]: spotify.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 13 15:37:08 lalabox node[831]: Volume received from AudioControl: 83 %.
Jan 13 15:37:13 lalabox systemd[1]: spotify.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.
Jan 13 15:37:13 lalabox systemd[1]: Starting Vollibrespot...

[rockynox]

My bad, I didn't check well, you're actually relying on librespot-org I will try to build HifiberryOS with an up to date version of this repo to see if it's working fine.

[hifiberry]

HiFiBerryOS uses this repo:
https://github.com/hifiberry/Vollibrespot

Feel free to create a patch to this repository. However, as far as I can see it's in sync with the vollibrespot master branch. We can't use the original repository as some changes are required for the HBOS integration.

[wisp3rwind]

I believe this needs to be priorized: I'm seeing constant crashes with some tracks, for example with this error (among others):

Feb 10 10:12:27 hifiberry vollibrespot[2119]: thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: SendError("...")', /home/matuschd/buildroot-4/host/share/cargo/git/checkouts/librespot-e4d7c35a023053af/1a224a3/playback
/src/player.rs:232:61

This error cannot happen in librespot since librespot-org/librespot#823, merged in 2021, which handles this error case more gracefully.

In effect, this means that Hifiberry OS is basically unusable for me right now, far from the plug-and-play solution it aims to be (on each crash, the service is restarted, but playback is interrupted and Spotify takes a while to recover and reconnect, and even then I need to manually resume playback).

---

I've browsed the source code superficially, and it seems to me that vollibrespot primarily provides the following on top of librespot:

• a config parser instead of just taking commmandline arguments
• piping metadata to a socket

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect what Hifiberry primarily needs is the metadata stream.

Given that vollibrespot as well as the librespot fork (building against librespot 0.4.2 doesn't work, just tested that) that it uses are unmaintained, it seems to me that what really should be done is to find a way to to use upstream librespot with as minimal an additional wrapper as possible.

So, what about:

• instead of having a toml config file with an additional parser, use the approach that raspotify takes: pass them as environment variables instead (documented here, just below the table: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options), which can be done by using an EnvironmentFile= entry in the service script, cf. the files

  • https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify/blob/master/raspotify/lib/systemd/system/raspotify.service
  • https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify/blob/master/raspotify/etc/raspotify/conf

• use librespots event system to obtain player status and metadata, cf. the documentation https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Events. This could be done by a simple script like https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/blob/dev/contrib/event_handler_example.py that forwards the data to the audiocontrol service. This would probably require using a dev version of librespot, which has more events and sends more metadata. I'd argue this is hardly worse than using a very outdated (network-facing, talking to a service that is also being updated) library.

Assuming that this works reliably, this seems like a much more maintainable approach.

[wisp3rwind]

Maybe, a more direct substitute would be to create a new fork of librespot, which is exactly one commit ahead of upstream, and replaces just the file https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/blob/dev/src/player_event_handler.rs by the metadata piping from vollibrespot. This seems like it should be easy to maintain as well (this is probably what one would do when starting vollibrespot over today).

Could you confirm that the metadata/event output is really all that HBOS needs?

[pulpier]

A player needs to implement at least 2 functions:

• providing meta data
• allow to control the player (play/pause/previous song/next song)

Metadata alone are not enough. If you can create a wrapper around librespot that handles this, feel free to create one and we're happy to integrate it. However, as we don't have any Rust skills, we won't be able to do this.

[wisp3rwind]

I've thought about this a bit more a while ago, and had one more idea on how to approach this: If upstream librespot would support the idea, one could add MPRIS support to librespot. There's a crate mpris-server which should make that fairly easy.

I might look into this myself at some point (...)

[hifiberry]

spotifyd already has mpris support. We had to change to vollibrespot as the MPRIS server got stuck after 60 minutes.
There is some experimental code of a spotifyd server running in docker that will be included in the next release.
However, there is no frontend-integration today.

[wisp3rwind]

For reference, I think this is what you are refering to: Spotifyd/spotifyd#337

[hifiberry]

Yes