An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd is more lightweight than the official client, and is available on more platforms.
Spotifyd requires a Spotify Premium account.
Unfortunately, Spotify decided to kill the libspotify library we used, and hence we had no choice but to rewrite everything.
Travis CI builds binaries for systems running Linux on AMD64 and ARMv7, which should run on Raspberry Pi model 2 and 3. The binaries can be found here. Other systems have to build from source for now.
The Rust compiler and Cargo package manager are needed:
cargo build --release
The resulting binary will be placed in target/release/spotifyd.
The default is to build spotifyd with an alsa backend, but it is possible
to build with other audio backends, making Spotifyd availible on platforms
other than Linux, by adding the --no-default-features argument to cargo
and supplying an alternative backend (see the Configuration section).
Spotifyd will search for a file name spotifyd.conf in the XDG config
directories (meaning, a users local config is placed in
~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf), and has the following format:
[global]
username = USER
password = PASS
backend = alsa
device = alsa_audio_device # Given by `aplay -L`
volume-control = alsa # or softvol
onstart = command_run_on_playback_start
onstop = command_run_on_playback_stop
device_name = name_in_spotify_connect
bitrate = 96|160|320
cache = cache_directory
Every field is optional, Spotifyd can even run without a configuration file.
Options can also be placed in a [spotifyd] section, which takes priority over
the [global] section, which is useful when you run applications related to
Spotifyd, which shares some but not all options with Spotifyd.
Values can be surrounded by double quotes ("), which is useful if it contains the comment character (#).
spotifyd --help gives an up to date list of available arguments. The command
line arguments allows for specifying a PID file, setting a verbose mode, run in
no-daemon mode, among othre things.
By default, the audio backend is alsa, as that is available by default on a lot
of machines, and requires no extra dependencies. There is also support for
pulseaudio. To use pulseaudio, compile with the --features flag to enable
it:
cargo build --release --features pulseaudio_backend
You will need the development package for pulseaudio, as well as "build-essentials" or the equivalent in your distribution.
Spotifyd communicates over the Spotify Connect protocol, meaning that it can be controlled from the official Spotify client on Android/iOS/Desktop.
For a more lightweight, and scriptable alternative, there is spotifyd-http, which is a work in progress but already supports basic tasks.
A systemd.service unit file is provided to help run spotifyd as a service on
systemd-based systems. The file contrib/spotifyd.service should be copied to
either:
cd /etc/systemd/user/
cd ~/.config/systemd/user/
Packagers of systemd-based distributions are encouraged to include the file in the former location. End-user should prefer the latter.
Control of the daemon is then done via systemd. The following example commands will run the service once, and enable the service to always run on login in the future, respectively:
systemctl --user start spotifyd.service
systemctl --user enable spotifyd.service
In --no-daemon mode, the log is written to standard output, otherwise it is
written to syslog, and where it's written can be configured in your system
logger.
The verbose mode adds more information, please enable this mode when submitting a bug report.
This project would not have been possible without the amazing reverse engineering work done in librespot, mostly by plietar.