spotify_player

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Examples
  • Demo
• Installation
• Features
  • Spotify Connect
  • Streaming
  • Lyric
  • Media Control
  • Image
  • Notify
  • Mouse support
  • Daemon
  • CLI commands
• Commands
• Configurations
• Caches
  • Logging
• Acknowledgement

Introduction

spotify_player is a fast, easy to use, and configurable terminal music player.

Features

• Minimalist UI with an intuitive paging and popup system.
• Highly configurable
• Feature parity with the official Spotify application.
• Support remote control with Spotify Connect.
• Support streaming songs directly from the terminal.
• Support lyric for most songs.
• Support cross-platform media control.
• Support image rendering.
• Support desktop notification.
• Support running the application as a daemon
• Offer a wide range of CLI commands

Examples

Demo

A demo of spotify_player v0.5.0-pre-release on youtube or on asciicast:

Playlist page

Artist page

Album page

Search page

Lyric page

Command help popup

Recommendation page

Installation

By default, the application's installed binary is spotify_player.

Requirements

A Spotify Premium account is required.

Dependencies

Windows and MacOS

• Rust and cargo as the build dependencies

Linux

• Rust and cargo as the build dependencies
• openssl, alsa-lib (streaming feature), libdbus (media-control feature) system libraries.
  • On Debian based systems, run the below command to install application's dependencies:

    sudo apt install libssl-dev libasound2-dev libdbus-1-dev

  • On Fedora based systems, run the below command to install application's dependencies:

    sudo yum install openssl-devel alsa-lib-devel dbus-devel

Binaries

Application's prebuilt binaries can be found in the Releases Page.

Note: to run the application, Linux systems need to install additional dependencies as specified in the Dependencies section.

Cargo

Run cargo install spotify_player to install the application from crates.io.

AUR

Run yay -S spotify-player to install the application as an AUR package.

FreeBSD

Run pkg install spotify-player to install the spotify_player binary from FreeBSD ports.

NetBSD

Using the package manager, run pkgin install spotify-player to install from the official repositories.

Building from source,

cd /usr/pkgsrc/audio/spotify-player
make install

Docker

Note: streaming feature is disabled when using the docker image.

You can download the binary image of the latest build from the master branch by running

docker pull aome510/spotify_player:latest

then run

docker run --rm -it aome510/spotify_player:latest

to run the application.

You can also use your local config folder to configure the application or your local cache folder to store the application's cache data when running the docker image:

docker run --rm \
-v $APP_CONFIG_FOLDER:/app/config/ \
-v $APP_CACHE_FOLDER:/app/cache/ \
-it aome510/spotify_player:latest

Features

Spotify Connect

To enable a full Spotify connect support, user will need to register a Spotify application and specify the application's client_id in the general configuration file as described in the configuration documentation.

More details about registering a Spotify application can be found in the official Spotify documentation.

When spotify_player runs with your own client_id, press D (default shortcut for SwitchDevice command) to get the list of available devices, then press enter (default shortcut for ChooseSelected command) to connect to the selected device.

An example of using Spotify connect to interact with the Spotify's official application:

Streaming

spotify_player supports streaming, which needs to be built/installed with streaming feature (enabled by default) and with an audio backend (rodio-backend by default). The streaming feature allows to spotify_player to play music directly from terminal.

The application uses librespot library to create an integrated Spotify client while running. The integrated client will register a Spotify speaker device under the spotify-player name, which is accessible on the Spotify connect device list.

Audio backend

spotify_player uses rodio as the default audio backend. List of available audio backends:

• alsa-backend
• pulseaudio-backend
• rodio-backend
• portaudio-backend
• jackaudio-backend
• rodiojack-backend
• sdl-backend
• gstreamer-backend

User can change the audio backend when building/installing the application by specifying the --features option. For example, to install spotify_player with pulseaudio-backend, run

cargo install spotify_player --no-default-features --features pulseaudio-backend

Note:

• needs to specify --no-default-features here because rodio-backend is one of the default features.
• user will need to install additional dependencies depending on the selected audio backend. More details can be found in the Librespot documentation.

The streaming feature can be also disabled upon installing by running

cargo install spotify_player --no-default-features

Lyric

To enable lyric support, spotify_player needs to be built/installed with lyric-finder feature (disabled by default). To install the application with lyric-finder feature included run:

cargo install spotify_player --features lyric-finder

User can view lyric of the currently playing track by calling the LyricPage command to go the lyric page. To do this, spotify_player needs to be built with a lyric-finder feature.

Under the hood, spotify_player retrieves the song's lyric using Genius.com.

Media Control

To enable media control support, spotify_player needs to be built/installed with media-control feature (enabled by default) and set the enable_media_control config option to true in the general configuration file.

Media control support is implemented using MPRIS DBus on Linux and OS window event listener on Windows and MacOS.

Image

To enable image rendering support, spotify_player needs to be built/installed with image feature (disabled by default). To install the application with image feature included, run:

cargo install spotify_player --features image

spotify_player supports rendering image in a full resolution if the application is run on either Kitty or iTerm2. Otherwise, the image will be displayed as block characters.

spotify_player also supports rendering images with sixel behind sixel feature flag, which also enables image feature:

cargo install spotify_player --features sixel

Notes:

• Not all terminals supported by libsixel are supported by spotify_player as it relies on a third-party library for image rendering. A possible list of supported terminals can be found in here.
• Images rendered by sixel can have a weird scale. It's recommended to tweak the cover_img_scale config option to get the best result as the scaling works differently with different terminals and fonts.

Examples of image rendering:

• iTerm2:

• Kitty:

• Sixel (foot terminal, cover_img_scale=1.8):

• Others:

Notify

To enable desktop notification support, spotify_player needs to be built/installed with notify feature (disabled by default). To install the application with notify feature included, run:

cargo install spotify_player --features notify

Note: the notification support in MacOS and Windows are quite restricted compared to Linux.

Mouse support

Currently, the only supported use case for mouse is to seek to a position of the current playback by left-clicking to such position in the playback's progress bar.

Daemon

To enable a daemon support, spotify_player needs to be built/installed with daemon feature (disabled by default). To install the application with daemon feature included, run:

cargo install spotify_player --features daemon

You can run the application as a daemon by specifying the -d or --daemon option: spotify_player -d.

Notes:

• daemon feature requires the streaming feature to be enabled and the application to be built with an audio backend

• because of the OS's restrictions, daemon feature doesn't work with the media-control feature on Windows and MacOS, which is enabled by default. In other words, if you want to use the daemon feature on Windows or MacOS, you must install the application with media-control feature disabled:

  cargo install spotify_player --no-default-features --features daemon,rodio-backend

CLI Commands

spotify_player offers several CLI commands to interact with a running spotify_player instance.

Under the hood, the application handles a CLI command by sending requests to a spotify_player instance's client socket running on the client_port port, a general application configuration with a default value 8080.

For more details, run spotify_player -h or spotify_player {command} -h, in which {command} is a CLI command.

Commands

To open a shortcut help popup, press ? or C-h (default shortcuts for OpenCommandHelp command).

List of supported commands:

To add new shortcuts or modify the default shortcuts, please refer to the keymaps section in the configuration documentation.

Tips:

• RefreshPlayback can be used to manually update the playback status.
• RestartIntegratedClient is useful when user wants to switch to another audio device (headphone, earphone, etc) without restarting the application, as the integrated client will be re-initialized with the new device.

Actions

A list of actions is available for each type of Spotify item (track, album, artist, or playlist). For example, the list of available actions on a track is [GoToAlbum, GoToArtist, GoToTrackRadio, GoToArtistRadio, GoToAlbumRadio, AddToPlaylist, DeleteFromCurrentPlaylist, AddToLikedTracks, DeleteFromLikedTracks].

To get the list of actions on an item, call the ShowActionsOnCurrentTrack command or ShowActionsOnSelectedItem command, then press enter (default binding for ChooseSelected command) to initiate the selected action.

Search Page

When first entering the search page, the application focuses on the search input. User can then input text, delete one character backward using backspace, or search the text using enter.

To move the focus from the search input to the other windows such as track results, album results, etc, use FocusNextWindow or FocusPreviousWindow.

Configurations

By default, spotify_player will look into $HOME/.config/spotify-player for application's configuration files. This can be changed by either specifying -c <FOLDER_PATH> or --config-folder <FOLDER_PATH> option.

Please refer to the configuration documentation for more details on the configuration options.

Caches

By default, spotify_player will look into $HOME/.cache/spotify-player for application's cache files, which include log files, Spotify's authorization credentials, audio cache files, etc. This can be changed by either specifying -C <FOLDER_PATH> or --cache-folder <FOLDER_PATH> option.

Logging

The application stores logs inside the $APP_CACHE_FOLDER/spotify-player-*.log file. For debugging or submitting an issue, user can also refer to the backtrace file in $APP_CACHE_FOLDER/spotify-player-*.backtrace, which includes the application's backtrace in case of panics/unexpected errors.

spotify_player uses RUST_LOG environment variable to define the application's logging level. RUST_LOG is default to be spotify_player=INFO, which only shows the application's logs.

Acknowledgement

spotify_player is written in Rust and is built on top of awesome libraries such as tui-rs, rspotify, librespot, and many more. It's highly inspired by spotify-tui and ncspot.