Spotify
Spotify is a digital music streaming service with a freemium business model. This article is mainly about the semi-official, proprietary Spotify for Linux client, which is developed by Spotify's engineers in their spare time and not actively supported by Spotify. Alternatively, there is an online player and a number of open source third-party clients.
Installation
Spotify for Linux can be installed with the spotifyAUR package. If you wish to add and play local files you will need to additionally install zenity and ffmpeg4.4.
Third-party clients
- Clementine — Able to stream from Spotify after activating (downloading) a plugin in the settings.
- Librespot — An open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service (streaming), without using the official closed-source libspotify.
- MellowPlayer — A free, open source and cross-platform desktop application that runs web-based music streaming services in its own window and provides integration with your desktop. No longer actively developed.
- Mopidy — An alternative plug-in based implementation of Music Player Daemon is able to stream from Spotify with an extension.
- https://mopidy.com/ || mopidy + mopidy-spotifyAUR
- ncspot — Cross-platform ncurses Spotify client written in Rust, inspired by ncmpc and the likes.
- Psst — Fast and multi-platform Spotify client, made in Rust with a native GUI.
- Spot — Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the Gnome desktop.
- Spotifyd — An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.
- spotify-qt — Lightweight Spotify client using Qt written in C++.
- Spicetify — A Powerful Command-Line tool to customize your Spotify-Client, Includes themes,extensions and more.
Tips and tricks
Limit storage size
Spotify automatically manage a storage size for caching, however one may want to force the size limit preventing the filesystem from filling up.
Append (measured in MB) to , e.g. a storage size of 3072MB:
Global media hotkeys
For environments in which controlling Spotify via the keyboard does not work automatically, the official Linux client has support for media keys like . We can use for example xbindkeys to catch the global media keypresses, and then forward them to Spotify using one of the methods below. If you use xbindkeys, ensure that Spotify is restarted after installation and key configuration otherwise the key events will not be properly caught.
MPRIS
The Spotify client implements the MPRIS D-Bus interface which allows external control.
pactl (pulseaudio)
As you might have noticed, MPRIS protocol commands do not include volume control. This is broken within spotify itself, which ignores volume change requests. However, there is a possibility to control volume via pulseaudio's input sink:
$ pactl set-sink-input-volume "$current_sink_num" +1% #volume up by 1% $ pactl set-sink-input-volume "$current_sink_num" -1% #volume down by 1% $ pactl set-sink-input-mute "$current_sink_num" toggle #mute toggler
The sink number for "$current_sink_num" can be found in the output of command:
$ pactl list sink-inputs
Sink Input #'''3''' << here Driver: protocol-native.c [...] application.name = "Spotify"
You can create a script for changing volume and bind it for example to keyboard shortcut via desktop environments configuration or xdotool described in next section. Here are some examples:
Bash:
#!/bin/bash
LANGUAGE="en_US"
app_name="Spotify"
current_sink_num=
sink_num_check=
app_name_check=
pactl list sink-inputs |while read line; do \
sink_num_check=$(echo "$line" |sed -rn 's/^Sink Input #(.*)/\1/p')
if [ "$sink_num_check" != "" ]; then
current_sink_num="$sink_num_check"
else
app_name_check=$(echo "$line" \
|sed -rn 's/application.name = "([^"]*)"/\1/p')
if [ "$app_name_check" = "$app_name" ]; then
pactl set-sink-input-volume "$current_sink_num" +1%
fi
fi
done
This script is based on work done by user Mikołak in this post.
Unfortunately this script is not the fastest solution and if you execute it multiple times via keyboard hotkey, it might become laggy.
Faster (like 10 times) Python code (requires at least Python 3.7 to be installed):
#!/usr/bin/env python3 #Author: Marcin Kocur, attribution license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ import subprocess import os x=0 y=0 env = os.environ env['LANG'] = 'en_US' app = '"Spotify"' pactl = subprocess.check_output(['pactl', 'list', 'sink-inputs'], env=env).decode().strip().split() if app in pactl: for e in pactl: x += 1 if e == app: break for i in pactl[0 : x -1 ]: y += 1 if i == 'Sink' and pactl[y] == 'Input' and '#' in pactl[y + 1]: sink_id = pactl[y+1] if i == 'Volume:' and '%' in pactl[y + 3]: volume = pactl[y + 3] sink_id = sink_id[1: ] volume = volume[ : -1 ] if int(volume) < 100: subprocess.run(['pactl', 'set-sink-input-volume', sink_id, '+1%'])
You can save it to a .py file. The last line does the actual job, so you can adjust the command to lower the volume or toggle mute.
Disable track notifications
After version 0.9.10, track change notifications were enabled by default. They can be quite intrusive. To disable them, launch Spotify with the option or add:
Alternatively, you can disable track notifications via the client's settings: disable Show desktop notifications when the song changes.
Show track notifications
provides a library you can use with python-gobject and a notification daemon such as to show the artist and title in a notification when the track changes.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import gi
gi.require_version('Playerctl', '2.0')
from gi.repository import Playerctl, GLib
from subprocess import Popen
player = Playerctl.Player()
def on_track_change(player, e):
track_info = '{artist} - {title}'.format(artist=player.get_artist(), title=player.get_title())
Popen(['notify-send', track_info])
player.connect('metadata', on_track_change)
GLib.MainLoop().run()
Skip overplayed radio tracks
Another use of the library is to skip tracks that are played too much on radio when you do not necessarily want to downvote these tracks because you may want to hear them again later on that station.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from gi.repository import Playerctl, GLib
player = Playerctl.Player()
played_out = ['Zu Fuss', 'Walk And Talk', 'Neuland']
def on_track_change(player, e):
if player.get_title() in played_out:
player.next()
player.on('metadata', on_track_change)
GLib.MainLoop().run()
spotblock
is a resource-efficient ad blocker that runs as a systemd daemon.
Spotify-AdKiller
is another alternative to block Spotify ads.
spotblock-rs
is a fast and light program to mute Spotify ads. It also works with PipeWire.
Hosts file
You may also add the following lines to your hosts file to block ads in Spotify:
Send commands via SSH
If you set up ssh on the server, you can send controls from a client to a remote Spotify instance with
$ ssh user@host yourcommand
where yourcommand can be spotifycmd that you installed on the server, or a dbus script for the linux version, as described above.
Grab the Spotify window via SSH
Aside from grabbing the whole desktop with TeamViewer or VNC to remotely control your server, you can also only grab the Spotify Window from the server to your client.
To do that, you need to configure sshd on your server and install x11vnc on both server and client as well as tigervnc on the client. Then you can use these scripts to grab either the complete dektop or only the Spotify window, which essentially gets you GUI client-like behavior as with MPD.
You will need to copy the second script to ~/.bin/vncgetspotify.sh on the server and the first script to any place on your client.
Finally, to grab the spotify window, run on the client:
$ sh vncget.sh
or, for the whole desktop:
$ sh vncget.sh all
HiDPI Mode
As the current Spotify build is not DPI aware, the amount to scale the interface by can be specified using the terminal command:
$ spotify --force-device-scale-factor=X
where X is the amount to scale the interface by, e.g 2.
This change can be added to the file in order to apply the scaling when launching from the desktop.
To make sure the file does not get overwritten when the package is updated, copy it to you local applications folder:
$ cp /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
Now edit ~/.local/share/applications/spotify.desktop and add the option:
You might need to relaunch your Desktop Manager, before these override changes will be effective.
Troubleshooting
Desktop Environment alerts (beeps) mutes Spotify
Comment out "module-role-cork" in the PulseAudio configuration file so it does not get loaded anymore.
Or unload it temporarily with:
$ pactl unload-module module-role-cork
Blinking images and improper rendering while using Spotify Linux with DWM
Start spotify as a floating window.
You can add this rule to the rules array in your :
{ "Spotify", NULL, NULL, 2, True, -1 },
This will tell dwm to start spotify as a floating window associated with the tag "2" no matter what window mode you are in. Recompile and install dwm to apply your new settings.
Broken search, browsing or radio
- Spotify bug report concerning non-english locales
If various tabs like browsing only show a blank screen, the search field does not seem to do anything or the radio page is broken (stuck when starting and unsresponsive to input) you might be using a custom locale.
Try setting the environment variable to before starting Spotify.
Deadlock GUI Thread
Can occur under tiling window managers, such as Awesome, when double-clicking new song or playlist. Edit the file to add or change the following:
ui.track_notifications_enabled=false
Restart Spotify. This will try to disable song notifications which seem to be the cause of the issue (the lack of a notification daemon to receive them makes the UI thread hang). Note that several causes appear to exist for this problem, and this particular fix only applies to select versions of Spotify client, i3 and Awesome, and it may be that additional root causes exist for the Debian and Ubuntu users reporting this issue. Observed with Spotify 0.9.17.1.g9b85d436 and Awesome 3.4.15 and i3-gaps 4.13-2 and Spotify 1.0.64.407.g9bd02c2d.
ui.track_notifications_enabled=false seems to be ignored. On the other hand, some users report not experiencing the deadlock anymore as of Awesome 3.5.6. Deadlocks could be caused by scripts called by Awesome, which rely on buggy spotify dbus properties. See https://github.com/acrisci/playerctl/issues/20.Note: This issue has multiple causes, so keep track of what you change while researching this. Update this section with additional scenarios and fixes.
Album art and images are missing, show up as squares
Quit Spotify, then open Spotify preferences
Change @https to @http:
network.proxy.addr="your-proxy.com:80@http" network.proxy.mode=2
See original forum post here.
Spotify does not detect other devices on local network
If a firewall is in place, open ports 57621 for UDP and TCP. If you use a variant of the iptables Simple stateful firewall, the following should do it:
iptables -A TCP -p tcp --dport 57621 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify iptables -A UDP -p udp --dport 57621 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify
It is also possible to restrict the source and destination to the local network.
If you are using Spotify Connect to play music on a wireless speaker or AVR, your firewall needs to be configured for Spotify's mDNS lookup of those. Sadly, it uses a random unprivileged port which makes these firewall rules rather nasty. Fortunately, you can restrict the rules to source port 1900 or 5353.
iptables -A UDP -p udp --sport 1900 --dport 1025:65535 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify iptables -A UDP -p udp --sport 5353 --dport 1025:65535 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify
If using MusicCast for streaming, you will also need to ensure that IGMP multicast packets are allowed to 224.0.0.22 (with IP options allowed) from the MusicCast speaker/AVR by all firewalls in place (including router firewall).
If you cannot detect other linux clients, this may be due to a bug in Spotify related to the user name launching the instance. Spotify will not detect other instances having the same environment variable, even on different machines. To circumvent this, either create a dedicated user, or launch Spotify with a different . The following is a workaround to use your home directory and still be able to detect other devices:
$ ln -s $HOME ~/.spotify_fakehome_$HOSTNAME $ HOME=$HOME/.spotify_fakehome_$HOSTNAME spotify &
Search Bar text is invisible when using a dark theme
The text in the search bar appears to be hardcoded to be white, making it invisible when using a dark Qt theme. To fix this, you will need to make an override.
First create a css file somewhere your account has permission to read/write from (such as your home folder). Call it whatever you like (eg. spotify-override.css).
Open the newly created css file and add the following:
QLineEdit { color: #000 }
Save the file and exit. Next, you need to add the following to the end of your Spotify launcher (substitute the path with the actual path of your css file):
-stylesheet=/home/user/spotify-override.css
So your full launch path should look something like this:
/usr/share/spotify/spotify-client/spotify -stylesheet=/home/user/spotify-override.css
Not respecting window manager rules
Window manager that try to apply specific rules like starting it on a determined workspace or maximizing it on startup, has no effect, as Spotify does not set the WM_CLASS property before creating the window, violating the ICCCM specifications. One solution is to use spotifywm-gitAUR.
GUI hangs while the music plays
Also the previous and next track buttons act with a delay of 10-40 seconds. Spotify by default tries to send notification about next track, if you do not have a notification-daemon installed, Spotify's GUI hangs.
The solution is to either disable notifications in the settings or to install a notification daemon from Desktop notifications.
Spotify occupies the whole screen over system panel and its borders are gone
If you have issue with window borders disappearing and the GUI going full-screen but you cannot drag the window or change its size, edit the preferences located by default in:
Close Spotify, remove both lines shown above, save and run Spotify again.
Cannot open settings in Wayland
When using Wayland, clicking on the 'Settings' button does nothing. Using the keyboard instead will work (arrows and enter). See
Crashes on startup
If you get a crash on startup with the following error message
[NNN:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(439)] GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye
Try to run with the flag.
Spotify has limited or no internet connectivity while using a VPN
More recent versions of Spotify (noticed after version ~1.1.10) use NetworkManager's detection of internet connectivity for determining if Spotify is able to play songs or even log in. When using a VPN service, Network Manager can fail to correctly identify internet connectivity, stating "Limited Connectivity". See NetworkManager#Checking connectivity for possible solutions.
Slow or laggy client
If Spotify is being unusually slow, common culprits usually are corrupted cache files. Run the following command, after closing your Spotify client:
$ rm -rf ~/.cache/spotify/Browser/* ~/.cache/spotify/Data/* ~/.cache/spotify/Storage/*
- Make sure you only delete the files inside the folders, and not the folders themselves.
- If that does not resolve the issue, try deleting and reinstalling.
See also
- Spotify for Linux — Spotify's homepage for the Linux client