Spotifyd

An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd is more lightweight than the official client, and is available on more platforms.

What happened to the old spotifyd, written in C?

Unfortunately, Spotify decided to kill the libspotify library we used, and hence we had no choice but to rewrite everything.

Installing

Travis CI builds binary 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.

Build from source

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).

Configuration

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`
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 (#).

Command Line Arguments

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.

Audio Backend

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 and portaudio. They require you to recompile with flags enabling them:

cargo build --release --features "portaudio pulseaudio"

You will need the development packages for portaudio and/or pulseaudio, as well as "build-essentials" or the equivalent in your distribution.

Usage

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.

Logging

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.

Credits

This project would not have been possible without the amazing reverse engineering work done in librespot, mostly by plietar.