16 ms·

Sunset of libspotify

215 points by ciroduran 4y ago

ciroduran 4y ago
It's really sad as this library has no official replacement. There's libraries like the Web API, but this is a library running on a browser. libspotify allowed playback for custom applications (such as Mopidy[1]). [1] https://mopidy.com/ https://mopidy.com/
- square_usual 4y ago
  AFAICT the community of unixy-hackers who used libspotify had moved on to librespot, eg. with spotifyd. Though of course, I don't know about every use case, and mopidy does seem stuck with the web api instead, which is weird considering the rise in popularity of spotifyd and spotify-tui.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Isn't a library like this essential for companies that build e.g. active speakers which support streaming from Spotify? So, shouldn't there be an official library?
    - sascha_sl 4y ago
      There is an SDK behind a "Contact Us" button and presumably an NDA. librespot uses that API.
  - adamcik 4y ago
    The plan for mopidy-spotify was to move towards web-api for everything we could to be on the official APIs where possible. So the end state would have been only streaming left on libspotify, then figure out how to get librespot and GStreamer to play well enough together (there is a plugin but it's missing at least one feature we need). But as you can see in issue #110 this goal hasn't been reached yet.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Is this an alternative? https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    Yes, that uses the non-public API for smart speakers and the likes. If and how Spotify can crack down on this is not well known at this point, but here's hoping they're using API keys from an old but popular device that's no longer receiving updates.
    - kirenida 4y ago
      My raspotify/librespot install stopped working last week until i blocked apresolve.spotify.com on my network. It seems they are switching some regions to a CDN that is not supported by librespot. There is some discussion on the librespot issues github page (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/972 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/972)
- rkachowski 4y ago
  Yeah it sucks, I found mopidy-spotify to be janky in it's usage but it was the least worst means of playing audio from various backends. It doesn't look like there's much hope for it in the future https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify edit: after looking a little deeper it seems there is indeed quite some activity and hope https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify/issues/110 https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify/issues/110
- regularfry 4y ago
  I stopped using Mopidy when I started having weird playlists and song history crop up in my account. Very clearly nothing I'd played. Best I can guess either there's a market in cracked auth tokens for the interface Mopidy use(s/d), or there's some sort of collision going on. Changed password, de-authed Mopidy and shut it off, and all of a sudden the random crap stopped.
  - tpxl 4y ago
    This happened to me using the official client. All was well after password change. Turns out, spotify gets their data breached regularly and I'm assuming that's the case here.
    - juanci_to 4y ago
      It happened to me and my brother too (in separate occasions), with the official client. The data and music "being played" with our accounts seemed so random and niche that I doubt that it was result of human interaction, seemed like something wrong with their DB. Also, changing the password didn't fix it. Had to change the password and also delete all the data in the account, losing also my data of course. It had so much garbage that it was pretty much ruined anyway
  - adamcik 4y ago
    The way auth tokens are setup for Mopidy-Spotify you hold the encryption key for the blob with the OAuth data, and the intermediate server just has an id and the encrypted data. Note that the id is not a Spotify OAuth client-id but an internal one. This is done so we don't have to ship Mopidy-Spotify with the client-secret for the App registration (this was pre PKCE auth). I.e. I would be highly surprised if our OAuth integration was the source for this issue, but I'm obviously biased as the author of https://github.com/adamcik/oauthclientbridge https://github.com/adamcik/oauthclientbridge As for libspotify, there you had to put in a (device) password and username, so if something scraped that config I guess all bets are off...
29athrowaway 4y ago
[cancels subscription] I am not interested of using the official client that requires 2 gb of memory and is full of bloat.
- ainiriand 4y ago
  I use the linux client and it consumes like 300mb at worst. That being said I think that Spotify is the worst application I have ever used, it is like they hate the users.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    It got worse a while ago, but it's quite fine again. Compared to the rest of music apps, it's a mile above.
- sdze 4y ago
  Truth. This electron crap is really a disgrace to computing. They should provide something like foobar2000
  - baisq 4y ago
    They used to
  - ecmascript 4y ago
    As a linux user electron has been a blessing. Before it, not many apps did support linux for obvious reasons but now most do.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Tbh, the election app is hardly better than using it in the browser. The browser version is better in some ways. It works on electron and now supports media keys.
      - lijogdfljk 4y ago
tjansen 4y ago
They have also shut down Spotify Stations this week :( It was the best alternative for Pandora, which still isn't available in Europe.
- rattray 4y ago
  I hadn't heard of this, apparently it was a small standalone app that only played Spotify radio stations. https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/spotify-stations-shutting-down-may-16/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/spotify-stations-shutting-... I have to admit I'm curious why this is a loss, as one can listen to the exact same stations on the main Spotify app?
  - krono 4y ago
    How are they going to push their podcasts and other sponsored content if you use an alternative interface? Wouldn't surprise me if their API won't be around for much longer either.
  - tjansen 4y ago
    Stations had a super-simple UI. You just start the app and the music starts. Only a single swipe was needed to change the station. It was perfect, especially in the car. The Spotify app is a mess. My stations are supposed to be in there, but I haven't found them yet. If I just want to play one of my playlists (and it's not in 'recently played'), I need to go to 'My Library', filter for playlists and then find it in the list. Beside 'recently played' the home screen is filled with stuff I don't care about.
    - morsch 4y ago
      Fwiw, (on Android) you can add playlists to your homescreen and they'll start playing immediately. It's in the playlist's ... menu.
      - tjansen 4y ago
        Thank you, but it looks like this is not available on iOS.
sslalready 4y ago
Kudos to Spotify for supporting libspotify and its use-cases for so many years. I'm sure it hasn't been easy and that copyright owners haven't been very fond of it.
- krono 4y ago
  Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence. Or, perhaps, and somewhat less grave, they needed this time to build their case / simply hadn't gotten around to this yet. Spotify has become pretty hostile towards its users, which makes it hard for me to believe there was any good will involved here.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    I really don’t get the hostility thing. I’ve been paying Spotify for like a decade — I give them money and then I play music with extremely broad device support, a massive library, and seamless offline with no upcharges. Spotify has got to be one of the least shady services I use.
    - krono 4y ago
      They use some of the darkest and most unobvious manipulative techniques to steer you towards some very nasty content - most of which comes in the form of their podcasts. Edit: It doesn't seem to me like the content itself is of any particular interest to them beyond the engagement its resulting in. It's that same hateful and harmful content you see on all these platforms where money has become more important than humanity.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        Yeah I notice they push the Joe Rogan Experience on me pretty hard even though I’ve clicked the button to stop showing me that rec. Can’t really blame them for trying after spending all that money on him though.
    - prohobo 4y ago
vehemenz 4y ago
It seems like Spotify’s developers are cut off from public input. For example, when the Electron client was released, they removed the standard back/forward keyboard shortcuts native to macOS (cmd+[ and cmd+]). Clearly, this was a regression and a relatively straightforward fix, but the issue was ignored in the community feedback forum because of “lack of popularity.”
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  the thing is, most commercial products are deconnected from reality because they do not have public issue trackers like e.g. github
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    Why does a public issue tracker lead to not being disconnected from reality? It's only a tiny minority that contributes to that and I don't see how that helps them be more grounded in reality. I am not saying it can't help but I don't think it is a sufficient condition.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      with github you are basically significantly reducing the psychological barrier of entry toward the action of reporting bugs or feature requests. I very frequently create issues on OSS projects. I've ~never done it on non-OSS projects, which is ad-hoc.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    I agree, but why present the facade of collecting bug reports via a community forum? Years ago Spotify implemented gapless playback because people asked for it. Then they got rid of mail because it wasn’t popular enough. I think they have the capability to improve their product, but they have become too reliant on what casual users want. Crowdsourcing isn’t a replacement for product management.
    - sph 4y ago
acatton 4y ago
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ
pabs3 4y ago
I note there is an archive of libspotify: https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/ https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/
- bin_bash 4y ago
  I would bet they're deprecating it because they plan to make incompatible changes on the API side
blowski 4y ago
FWIW, this is my rant. I cancelled Spotify last month. I've been a subscriber since 2006. The app has become increasingly buggy, especially on my newish iPad. Frequently would refuse to play for minutes at a time. But more critically, Spotify has become focused on "generating background noise as profitably as possible". I originally liked Spotify as a way of finding interesting albums I haven't listened to before, but now it's all podcasts and easy-listening covers. It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes. My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.
- gaws 4y ago
  > It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes. This can be turned off in the settings.
- IanCal 4y ago
  My way of discovering new music using the magic of AI is to ask Alexa to play something and see what weird song it returns after it either mis-hears me or decides to play a bizarre cover.
  - aerostable_slug 4y ago
    > bizarre cover "Gin and Juice", covered by Sissy Bar on their album "Statutory Grape" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDq2FGsEGd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDq2FGsEGd8
    - janlaureys 4y ago
      I realise this isn't reddit. But this totally unlocked this memory in my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3EwjWhyUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3EwjWhyUU
    - hericium 4y ago
      What's the original song? This doesn't sound like a cover of Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Gin and Juice"[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3yXg-sX5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3yXg-sX5c
VGltZUNvbnN1 4y ago
At least there is still https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot I just hope they don't rely on libspotify's api endpoints or I need a new solutions for my Raspberry Pi connected speakers.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  I have same concerns.
- 0atman 4y ago
  The wording on the rust crate suggests that it's the correct way to interact with spotify these days https://crates.io/crates/librespot https://crates.io/crates/librespot
oneoff786 4y ago
Strongly suggest using the Spotify desktop web client. Content plays in album order. Even on free tier no restrictions for skips or playing specific songs. Ublock origin works just fine but will sometimes need a nudge after a while if it gets stuck on an ad.
SnowHill9902 4y ago
Has anybody else also started getting ads within podcasts on premium membership?
- larsnystrom 4y ago
  I recently read an article[1] where Spotify said they wanted the ad revenue to make up 20-40% (up from like 10% or so now) of their income, and so they are trying to push more ads. As a premium subscriber since 2010, I promised myself that the day I hear an ad on Spotify premium is the day I cancel my subscription. The direction Spotify has taken the past few years really saddens me. [1] (Swedish, paywall) https://www.svd.se/a/Kzgvm4/spotify-spellistor-nyckel-till-annonsforsaljning https://www.svd.se/a/Kzgvm4/spotify-spellistor-nyckel-till-a...
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    I'm only a recent paid subscriber to Spotify, but, like you, will drop it like a hot potato if ads make their way into premium. I've previously stated I'd never pay for a subscription service again after Google Play music shutdown, effectively losing any record of the 'license' for some music I actually purchased from the platform. Whilst I have broken that promise, I have stayed true to my commitment of purchasing the equivalent of the monthly GPM subscription from Bandcamp, however. Footnote: I just checked, and I'm ~$30 behind, gonna buy those two psych-rock 50+ minute album-songs by The Asteroid Belt: https://theasteroidbelt.bandcamp.com/ https://theasteroidbelt.bandcamp.com/. Gotta support local first!
  - chinathrow 4y ago
    There are others. I am happy with Deezer - no ads as far as I can tell.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    I was really confused and heard it only once. It was also wildly irrelevant.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    Alright then, lower the premium subscription costs for users! What is the _fucking_ point of premium if you still deal with ads?
dest 4y ago
Raspotify uses librespot and should keep working https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  Unfortunately its a bit unstable. I used to run raspotify and it always crashed due to some network issue or session timeout or whatnot and then wouldn't recover until the service was restarted. I'm glad it exists, but it cannot be relied upon. Maybe in a year or so.
  - discardedrefuse 4y ago
    I've been running Raspotify on a Raspberry Pi Zero W for nearly a year. And I've had to restart the service 4 times; mildly annoying. It might be a good idea to make a cron job that restarts the service every night.
    - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
      If only, its crashing after ~1h or so.
  - selfhoster69 4y ago
    Can confirm this. This is also one of the reasons why I moved to librespot-java.
    - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
      Is there a player similar to raspotify which uses librespot-java?
trasz 4y ago
>What are the alternatives to libspotify Torrents. No, I’m dead serious. How big is your music library? Less than 1TB, isn’t it? Last year I’ve bought 1TB SSD for some 50$. Streaming services for music simply don’t make technical sense anymore. What we need is a mirroring service.
- fallat 4y ago
  I'll use this as an opportunity to ask others: how large is your music library in bytes? I used to collect music until one day I lost everything (it was all on one harddrive) - these days I just keep the stuff that is now rare / cannot be found anymore. If I know even the average largest music libraries are ~1TB I will gladly buy two 1TB drives and begin collecting and buying music again.
  - Macha 4y ago
    7345 songs (including 815 FLACs), 63GiB.
  - ta987238723 4y ago
    Been there (lost ~120G, 50k songs), done that (music on RAID1 + backup drive). Current stats: My "sorted" folder is what I sometimes listen to, and music that I collected or assimilated out of my own interest. That's 139G, containing ~18k files in ~2k folders. This includes about 500 flacs, the gross remainder is mp3. I try to get 256 to 320kbps these days, true stereo. My old collection started in the days of slow internet and 128kbps joint stereo (and sometimes even 96kbps), hence the massive difference in size. My "unsorted" folder is an additional 266G with 35k files (60 flacs) in 4400 folders. This is mainly collections I got from friends and contains stuff I don't regularly listen to, and for which I have not yet checked the quality. Probably also a bunch of duplicates. 1TB sounds fair, though I'd go with a RAID1 of 2TB drives just to be sure. I wouldn't bother with SSDs, but if physical size matters check out 2.5" HDDs. TBH, most of the time I just use tidal; unless I want a something that's not on there (or some specific version).
    - trasz 4y ago
agluszak 4y ago
Is there currently any music streaming service with an officially supported API?
- dewey 4y ago
  You are making it sound like they shut down their API. They didn't, they just stopped maintaining an already deprecated project and asked developers to switch to the new ones. The other streaming services also have APIs like that. I'm not saying they are extremely powerful and you can do everything with them but they exist: Apple Music: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/ Spotify: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/
  - Macha 4y ago
    Their new API does not cover the use cases of their old API, nor is it likely to as copyright holders are more likely to object to the lack of DRM in the old API (which was basically "authenticate, get direct access to audio data". The new official API is tied into EME DRM, which only works if you are a browser with a valid CDM. They also have Android and iOS APIs that support those platforms DRM implementations, but nothing for apps that are neither web nor mobile
    - dewey 4y ago
      The question was about an "officially supported API" not specifically about an API with doesn't use DRM.
      - Macha 4y ago
        They do not have an API comparable to libspotify. libspotify was mainly used in desktop apps and headless apps. There is no currently supported option for those apps, only the unofficial librespot, which is using the private APIs without a license.
postit 4y ago
If I’m not mistaken the device I bought to play music in my living room uses libspotify. It’s a closed source device from a manufacturer that never open source stuff. So now I’ll probably end with a glorified cdplayer.
- hrnnnnnn 4y ago
  It should be using the embedded sdk, unless that manufacturer went particularly rogue. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/commercial-hardware/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/commercial-hardw...
josephd79 4y ago
I use last.fm connected to my Spotify.
andoma 4y ago
Used to work for Spotify back in the days. I was the maintainer of libspotify since its inception (early 2009) and a few years on. TBH I'm surprised it was still being supported up until this day by the backend. Though, some of the earliest hardware integrations were made using libspotify (before the eSDK came about) so I suppose it just had to be kept alive longer than otherwise would have been needed. RIP <3
- mschulze 4y ago
  Hey, Cool to see someone who worked on this :) Back in the day I wrote a (probably really bad, not a C/C++ developer) wrapper around libspotify for Node.js: https://github.com/FrontierPsychiatrist/node-spotify https://github.com/FrontierPsychiatrist/node-spotify At some point it could do enough for me to build a webapp with Node.js running on a Rapsberry Pi to stream Spotify. I even got contacted by Spotify to take down the domain node-spotify.com for it.
- juanci_to 4y ago
  How was it working for Spotify? They are kind of an interesting company for me
- tommiegannert 4y ago
  I agree. Seems it had a good run. I still remember the fairly long discussions of whether to make the public API C or C++. Fun times. :)
  - gaws 4y ago
    > C or C++ How did Spotify land on C?
    - tommiegannert 4y ago
      The client itself was C++, so it would have been the natural choice. But we didn't want the ABI liability since it was shipped in binary form. So libspotify became a thin C-wrapper over the C++ core. That way, we didn't have to worry about vtable layouts blowing up.
kiawe_fire 4y ago
Too bad to see this go - this was the only API out of the modern streaming services that you could actually use to build something truly new. The new Spotify API (along with others like Apple Music) basically allow you to do some of the things the official players offer for browsing and managing music, and give simplistic playback options - effectively, you can build a Fisher Price version of the official app, following the official app’s template, and that’s about it. I get that it’s all DRM driven, but it really sucks - from Spotify to Netflix and everything in between, we have all these online services with great(ish?) content but terrible UI, bloated embedded browser-based apps and just all around bad user experiences. So much could happen to better these services if they offered open APIs to subscribers. It’s frustrating that we have so many tools for building apps that run everywhere, yet everything seems so increasingly locked down. This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity, and yet it feels like it’s becoming one of the most restrictive times.
- loceng 4y ago
  So what's the problem here: is it laws (DRM) or is it profit driven? If it's law/DRM - then the law is broken, no? How then does the law/policy exist to allow "the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity"?
  - kiawe_fire 4y ago
    Those are good questions. I think the primary driver is DRM, which itself is driven by the content owners more so than service providers. While the streaming services themselves surely want to protect their service from theft, they would largely benefit (with some caveats) from having a platform that's extensible and flexible as a competitive edge, similar to how a phone vendor wants to have a thriving third party app scene. Meanwhile, the content owners still use misguided tactics that punish legitimate users in the hopes of stopping piracy. Piracy that always seems to find a way to continue. This leads to some good questions around what kind of policy can be made to give content owners legal rights to their IP while also respecting user's rights to build and extend. Because ultimately the core offering of these streaming services is their breadth of content and the license negotiations and library management they do. Their apps are just front-ends to that. So, a "right to extend" initiative that pairs with the "right to repair" initiatives could be something interesting to explore.
hnarayanan 4y ago
This is only peripherally related, but if you were using libspotify to work on a a command line client, I have an alternative approach. Shpotify offers command line control of the Spotify app on Macs: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify
karaterobot 4y ago
The way I used to find new music was to read reviews in magazines, then buy the album. Later, it was blogs and torrents, but the principle is the same. Using algorithms to discover music works for a lot of people, but I'm not sure that, for me, it ever outperformed just reading what other people said and then listening to the album if it sounded intriguing. It is more labor intensive, but the results were higher quality. Finding one artist I really, really like is worth sifting through a hundred mediocre ones, so whatever process gets me there is the best. I like Spotify for other reasons, like being able to really deep dive into some artist (or some song: just listening to 20 different cover versions obsessively to see who did it best), but even before it was supposedly ruined, I was never blown away by their recommendations to me.
iostream24 4y ago
I have never used Spotify in my life and I resent the notion that I must do so. I consider them part of the race to the bottom I want no part of. I love music, particularly original music that’s a bit different. I dislike a €4 billion company having any monopoly on suggestions and this whole playlists thing is just eye rollingly bad: pay for placement on some guys glorified mixtape? No thanks, I don’t want to discover sycophants that way.
rumori 4y ago
Last time I checked you can only control the official Spotify application on iOS with your own app, wich also means your app has to throw the user into Spotify to be able to start playback and then Spotify kicking it back to your app once playback started. A truly horrible user experience. I think a lot of small music discovery apps will either break or have to fall back to the above experience. My guess is this is the actual reason for the sunsetting, similarly how Twitter cut back the API access back in the day.

215 points by ciroduran 4y ago

It's really sad as this library has no official replacement. There's libraries like the Web API, but this is a library running on a browser. libspotify allowed playback for custom applications (such as Mopidy[1]). [1] https://mopidy.com/ https://mopidy.com/

square_usual 4y ago
AFAICT the community of unixy-hackers who used libspotify had moved on to librespot, eg. with spotifyd. Though of course, I don't know about every use case, and mopidy does seem stuck with the web api instead, which is weird considering the rise in popularity of spotifyd and spotify-tui.
- amelius 4y ago
  Isn't a library like this essential for companies that build e.g. active speakers which support streaming from Spotify? So, shouldn't there be an official library?
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    There is an SDK behind a "Contact Us" button and presumably an NDA. librespot uses that API.
- adamcik 4y ago
  The plan for mopidy-spotify was to move towards web-api for everything we could to be on the official APIs where possible. So the end state would have been only streaming left on libspotify, then figure out how to get librespot and GStreamer to play well enough together (there is a plugin but it's missing at least one feature we need). But as you can see in issue #110 this goal hasn't been reached yet.
mccorrinall 4y ago
Is this an alternative? https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  Yes, that uses the non-public API for smart speakers and the likes. If and how Spotify can crack down on this is not well known at this point, but here's hoping they're using API keys from an old but popular device that's no longer receiving updates.
  - kirenida 4y ago
    My raspotify/librespot install stopped working last week until i blocked apresolve.spotify.com on my network. It seems they are switching some regions to a CDN that is not supported by librespot. There is some discussion on the librespot issues github page (https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/972 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/972)
rkachowski 4y ago
Yeah it sucks, I found mopidy-spotify to be janky in it's usage but it was the least worst means of playing audio from various backends. It doesn't look like there's much hope for it in the future https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify edit: after looking a little deeper it seems there is indeed quite some activity and hope https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify/issues/110 https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy-spotify/issues/110
regularfry 4y ago
I stopped using Mopidy when I started having weird playlists and song history crop up in my account. Very clearly nothing I'd played. Best I can guess either there's a market in cracked auth tokens for the interface Mopidy use(s/d), or there's some sort of collision going on. Changed password, de-authed Mopidy and shut it off, and all of a sudden the random crap stopped.
- tpxl 4y ago
  This happened to me using the official client. All was well after password change. Turns out, spotify gets their data breached regularly and I'm assuming that's the case here.
  - juanci_to 4y ago
    It happened to me and my brother too (in separate occasions), with the official client. The data and music "being played" with our accounts seemed so random and niche that I doubt that it was result of human interaction, seemed like something wrong with their DB. Also, changing the password didn't fix it. Had to change the password and also delete all the data in the account, losing also my data of course. It had so much garbage that it was pretty much ruined anyway
- adamcik 4y ago
  The way auth tokens are setup for Mopidy-Spotify you hold the encryption key for the blob with the OAuth data, and the intermediate server just has an id and the encrypted data. Note that the id is not a Spotify OAuth client-id but an internal one. This is done so we don't have to ship Mopidy-Spotify with the client-secret for the App registration (this was pre PKCE auth). I.e. I would be highly surprised if our OAuth integration was the source for this issue, but I'm obviously biased as the author of https://github.com/adamcik/oauthclientbridge https://github.com/adamcik/oauthclientbridge As for libspotify, there you had to put in a (device) password and username, so if something scraped that config I guess all bets are off...

29athrowaway 4y ago

[cancels subscription] I am not interested of using the official client that requires 2 gb of memory and is full of bloat.

ainiriand 4y ago
I use the linux client and it consumes like 300mb at worst. That being said I think that Spotify is the worst application I have ever used, it is like they hate the users.
- Avamander 4y ago
  It got worse a while ago, but it's quite fine again. Compared to the rest of music apps, it's a mile above.
sdze 4y ago
Truth. This electron crap is really a disgrace to computing. They should provide something like foobar2000
- baisq 4y ago
  They used to
- ecmascript 4y ago
  As a linux user electron has been a blessing. Before it, not many apps did support linux for obvious reasons but now most do.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Tbh, the election app is hardly better than using it in the browser. The browser version is better in some ways. It works on electron and now supports media keys.
    - lijogdfljk 4y ago

tjansen 4y ago

They have also shut down Spotify Stations this week :( It was the best alternative for Pandora, which still isn't available in Europe.

rattray 4y ago
I hadn't heard of this, apparently it was a small standalone app that only played Spotify radio stations. https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/spotify-stations-shutting-down-may-16/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/06/spotify-stations-shutting-... I have to admit I'm curious why this is a loss, as one can listen to the exact same stations on the main Spotify app?
- krono 4y ago
  How are they going to push their podcasts and other sponsored content if you use an alternative interface? Wouldn't surprise me if their API won't be around for much longer either.
- tjansen 4y ago
  Stations had a super-simple UI. You just start the app and the music starts. Only a single swipe was needed to change the station. It was perfect, especially in the car. The Spotify app is a mess. My stations are supposed to be in there, but I haven't found them yet. If I just want to play one of my playlists (and it's not in 'recently played'), I need to go to 'My Library', filter for playlists and then find it in the list. Beside 'recently played' the home screen is filled with stuff I don't care about.
  - morsch 4y ago
    Fwiw, (on Android) you can add playlists to your homescreen and they'll start playing immediately. It's in the playlist's ... menu.
    - tjansen 4y ago
      Thank you, but it looks like this is not available on iOS.

sslalready 4y ago

Kudos to Spotify for supporting libspotify and its use-cases for so many years. I'm sure it hasn't been easy and that copyright owners haven't been very fond of it.

krono 4y ago
Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence. Or, perhaps, and somewhat less grave, they needed this time to build their case / simply hadn't gotten around to this yet. Spotify has become pretty hostile towards its users, which makes it hard for me to believe there was any good will involved here.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I really don’t get the hostility thing. I’ve been paying Spotify for like a decade — I give them money and then I play music with extremely broad device support, a massive library, and seamless offline with no upcharges. Spotify has got to be one of the least shady services I use.
  - krono 4y ago
    They use some of the darkest and most unobvious manipulative techniques to steer you towards some very nasty content - most of which comes in the form of their podcasts. Edit: It doesn't seem to me like the content itself is of any particular interest to them beyond the engagement its resulting in. It's that same hateful and harmful content you see on all these platforms where money has become more important than humanity.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Yeah I notice they push the Joe Rogan Experience on me pretty hard even though I’ve clicked the button to stop showing me that rec. Can’t really blame them for trying after spending all that money on him though.
  - prohobo 4y ago

vehemenz 4y ago

It seems like Spotify’s developers are cut off from public input. For example, when the Electron client was released, they removed the standard back/forward keyboard shortcuts native to macOS (cmd+[ and cmd+]). Clearly, this was a regression and a relatively straightforward fix, but the issue was ignored in the community feedback forum because of “lack of popularity.”

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
the thing is, most commercial products are deconnected from reality because they do not have public issue trackers like e.g. github
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Why does a public issue tracker lead to not being disconnected from reality? It's only a tiny minority that contributes to that and I don't see how that helps them be more grounded in reality. I am not saying it can't help but I don't think it is a sufficient condition.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    with github you are basically significantly reducing the psychological barrier of entry toward the action of reporting bugs or feature requests. I very frequently create issues on OSS projects. I've ~never done it on non-OSS projects, which is ad-hoc.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  I agree, but why present the facade of collecting bug reports via a community forum? Years ago Spotify implemented gapless playback because people asked for it. Then they got rid of mail because it wasn’t popular enough. I think they have the capability to improve their product, but they have become too reliant on what casual users want. Crowdsourcing isn’t a replacement for product management.
  - sph 4y ago

acatton 4y ago

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc8f639H6dQ

pabs3 4y ago

I note there is an archive of libspotify: https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/ https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/

bin_bash 4y ago
I would bet they're deprecating it because they plan to make incompatible changes on the API side

blowski 4y ago

FWIW, this is my rant. I cancelled Spotify last month. I've been a subscriber since 2006. The app has become increasingly buggy, especially on my newish iPad. Frequently would refuse to play for minutes at a time. But more critically, Spotify has become focused on "generating background noise as profitably as possible". I originally liked Spotify as a way of finding interesting albums I haven't listened to before, but now it's all podcasts and easy-listening covers. It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes. My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.

gaws 4y ago
> It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes. This can be turned off in the settings.
IanCal 4y ago
My way of discovering new music using the magic of AI is to ask Alexa to play something and see what weird song it returns after it either mis-hears me or decides to play a bizarre cover.
- aerostable_slug 4y ago
  > bizarre cover "Gin and Juice", covered by Sissy Bar on their album "Statutory Grape" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDq2FGsEGd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDq2FGsEGd8
  - janlaureys 4y ago
    I realise this isn't reddit. But this totally unlocked this memory in my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3EwjWhyUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3EwjWhyUU
  - hericium 4y ago
    What's the original song? This doesn't sound like a cover of Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Gin and Juice"[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3yXg-sX5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3yXg-sX5c

VGltZUNvbnN1 4y ago

At least there is still https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot I just hope they don't rely on libspotify's api endpoints or I need a new solutions for my Raspberry Pi connected speakers.

t0bia_s 4y ago
I have same concerns.
0atman 4y ago
The wording on the rust crate suggests that it's the correct way to interact with spotify these days https://crates.io/crates/librespot https://crates.io/crates/librespot

oneoff786 4y ago

Strongly suggest using the Spotify desktop web client. Content plays in album order. Even on free tier no restrictions for skips or playing specific songs. Ublock origin works just fine but will sometimes need a nudge after a while if it gets stuck on an ad.

SnowHill9902 4y ago

Has anybody else also started getting ads within podcasts on premium membership?

larsnystrom 4y ago
I recently read an article[1] where Spotify said they wanted the ad revenue to make up 20-40% (up from like 10% or so now) of their income, and so they are trying to push more ads. As a premium subscriber since 2010, I promised myself that the day I hear an ad on Spotify premium is the day I cancel my subscription. The direction Spotify has taken the past few years really saddens me. [1] (Swedish, paywall) https://www.svd.se/a/Kzgvm4/spotify-spellistor-nyckel-till-annonsforsaljning https://www.svd.se/a/Kzgvm4/spotify-spellistor-nyckel-till-a...
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  I'm only a recent paid subscriber to Spotify, but, like you, will drop it like a hot potato if ads make their way into premium. I've previously stated I'd never pay for a subscription service again after Google Play music shutdown, effectively losing any record of the 'license' for some music I actually purchased from the platform. Whilst I have broken that promise, I have stayed true to my commitment of purchasing the equivalent of the monthly GPM subscription from Bandcamp, however. Footnote: I just checked, and I'm ~$30 behind, gonna buy those two psych-rock 50+ minute album-songs by The Asteroid Belt: https://theasteroidbelt.bandcamp.com/ https://theasteroidbelt.bandcamp.com/. Gotta support local first!
- chinathrow 4y ago
  There are others. I am happy with Deezer - no ads as far as I can tell.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  I was really confused and heard it only once. It was also wildly irrelevant.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Alright then, lower the premium subscription costs for users! What is the _fucking_ point of premium if you still deal with ads?

dest 4y ago

Raspotify uses librespot and should keep working https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
Unfortunately its a bit unstable. I used to run raspotify and it always crashed due to some network issue or session timeout or whatnot and then wouldn't recover until the service was restarted. I'm glad it exists, but it cannot be relied upon. Maybe in a year or so.
- discardedrefuse 4y ago
  I've been running Raspotify on a Raspberry Pi Zero W for nearly a year. And I've had to restart the service 4 times; mildly annoying. It might be a good idea to make a cron job that restarts the service every night.
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    If only, its crashing after ~1h or so.
- selfhoster69 4y ago
  Can confirm this. This is also one of the reasons why I moved to librespot-java.
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    Is there a player similar to raspotify which uses librespot-java?

trasz 4y ago

>What are the alternatives to libspotify Torrents. No, I’m dead serious. How big is your music library? Less than 1TB, isn’t it? Last year I’ve bought 1TB SSD for some 50$. Streaming services for music simply don’t make technical sense anymore. What we need is a mirroring service.

fallat 4y ago
I'll use this as an opportunity to ask others: how large is your music library in bytes? I used to collect music until one day I lost everything (it was all on one harddrive) - these days I just keep the stuff that is now rare / cannot be found anymore. If I know even the average largest music libraries are ~1TB I will gladly buy two 1TB drives and begin collecting and buying music again.
- Macha 4y ago
  7345 songs (including 815 FLACs), 63GiB.
- ta987238723 4y ago
  Been there (lost ~120G, 50k songs), done that (music on RAID1 + backup drive). Current stats: My "sorted" folder is what I sometimes listen to, and music that I collected or assimilated out of my own interest. That's 139G, containing ~18k files in ~2k folders. This includes about 500 flacs, the gross remainder is mp3. I try to get 256 to 320kbps these days, true stereo. My old collection started in the days of slow internet and 128kbps joint stereo (and sometimes even 96kbps), hence the massive difference in size. My "unsorted" folder is an additional 266G with 35k files (60 flacs) in 4400 folders. This is mainly collections I got from friends and contains stuff I don't regularly listen to, and for which I have not yet checked the quality. Probably also a bunch of duplicates. 1TB sounds fair, though I'd go with a RAID1 of 2TB drives just to be sure. I wouldn't bother with SSDs, but if physical size matters check out 2.5" HDDs. TBH, most of the time I just use tidal; unless I want a something that's not on there (or some specific version).
  - trasz 4y ago

agluszak 4y ago

Is there currently any music streaming service with an officially supported API?

dewey 4y ago
You are making it sound like they shut down their API. They didn't, they just stopped maintaining an already deprecated project and asked developers to switch to the new ones. The other streaming services also have APIs like that. I'm not saying they are extremely powerful and you can do everything with them but they exist: Apple Music: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/ Spotify: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/
- Macha 4y ago
  Their new API does not cover the use cases of their old API, nor is it likely to as copyright holders are more likely to object to the lack of DRM in the old API (which was basically "authenticate, get direct access to audio data". The new official API is tied into EME DRM, which only works if you are a browser with a valid CDM. They also have Android and iOS APIs that support those platforms DRM implementations, but nothing for apps that are neither web nor mobile
  - dewey 4y ago
    The question was about an "officially supported API" not specifically about an API with doesn't use DRM.
    - Macha 4y ago
      They do not have an API comparable to libspotify. libspotify was mainly used in desktop apps and headless apps. There is no currently supported option for those apps, only the unofficial librespot, which is using the private APIs without a license.

postit 4y ago

If I’m not mistaken the device I bought to play music in my living room uses libspotify. It’s a closed source device from a manufacturer that never open source stuff. So now I’ll probably end with a glorified cdplayer.

hrnnnnnn 4y ago
It should be using the embedded sdk, unless that manufacturer went particularly rogue. https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/commercial-hardware/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/commercial-hardw...

josephd79 4y ago

I use last.fm connected to my Spotify.

andoma 4y ago

Used to work for Spotify back in the days. I was the maintainer of libspotify since its inception (early 2009) and a few years on. TBH I'm surprised it was still being supported up until this day by the backend. Though, some of the earliest hardware integrations were made using libspotify (before the eSDK came about) so I suppose it just had to be kept alive longer than otherwise would have been needed. RIP <3

mschulze 4y ago
Hey, Cool to see someone who worked on this :) Back in the day I wrote a (probably really bad, not a C/C++ developer) wrapper around libspotify for Node.js: https://github.com/FrontierPsychiatrist/node-spotify https://github.com/FrontierPsychiatrist/node-spotify At some point it could do enough for me to build a webapp with Node.js running on a Rapsberry Pi to stream Spotify. I even got contacted by Spotify to take down the domain node-spotify.com for it.
juanci_to 4y ago
How was it working for Spotify? They are kind of an interesting company for me
tommiegannert 4y ago
I agree. Seems it had a good run. I still remember the fairly long discussions of whether to make the public API C or C++. Fun times. :)
- gaws 4y ago
  > C or C++ How did Spotify land on C?
  - tommiegannert 4y ago
    The client itself was C++, so it would have been the natural choice. But we didn't want the ABI liability since it was shipped in binary form. So libspotify became a thin C-wrapper over the C++ core. That way, we didn't have to worry about vtable layouts blowing up.

kiawe_fire 4y ago

Too bad to see this go - this was the only API out of the modern streaming services that you could actually use to build something truly new. The new Spotify API (along with others like Apple Music) basically allow you to do some of the things the official players offer for browsing and managing music, and give simplistic playback options - effectively, you can build a Fisher Price version of the official app, following the official app’s template, and that’s about it. I get that it’s all DRM driven, but it really sucks - from Spotify to Netflix and everything in between, we have all these online services with great(ish?) content but terrible UI, bloated embedded browser-based apps and just all around bad user experiences. So much could happen to better these services if they offered open APIs to subscribers. It’s frustrating that we have so many tools for building apps that run everywhere, yet everything seems so increasingly locked down. This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity, and yet it feels like it’s becoming one of the most restrictive times.

loceng 4y ago
So what's the problem here: is it laws (DRM) or is it profit driven? If it's law/DRM - then the law is broken, no? How then does the law/policy exist to allow "the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity"?
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  Those are good questions. I think the primary driver is DRM, which itself is driven by the content owners more so than service providers. While the streaming services themselves surely want to protect their service from theft, they would largely benefit (with some caveats) from having a platform that's extensible and flexible as a competitive edge, similar to how a phone vendor wants to have a thriving third party app scene. Meanwhile, the content owners still use misguided tactics that punish legitimate users in the hopes of stopping piracy. Piracy that always seems to find a way to continue. This leads to some good questions around what kind of policy can be made to give content owners legal rights to their IP while also respecting user's rights to build and extend. Because ultimately the core offering of these streaming services is their breadth of content and the license negotiations and library management they do. Their apps are just front-ends to that. So, a "right to extend" initiative that pairs with the "right to repair" initiatives could be something interesting to explore.

hnarayanan 4y ago

This is only peripherally related, but if you were using libspotify to work on a a command line client, I have an alternative approach. Shpotify offers command line control of the Spotify app on Macs: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify

karaterobot 4y ago

The way I used to find new music was to read reviews in magazines, then buy the album. Later, it was blogs and torrents, but the principle is the same. Using algorithms to discover music works for a lot of people, but I'm not sure that, for me, it ever outperformed just reading what other people said and then listening to the album if it sounded intriguing. It is more labor intensive, but the results were higher quality. Finding one artist I really, really like is worth sifting through a hundred mediocre ones, so whatever process gets me there is the best. I like Spotify for other reasons, like being able to really deep dive into some artist (or some song: just listening to 20 different cover versions obsessively to see who did it best), but even before it was supposedly ruined, I was never blown away by their recommendations to me.

iostream24 4y ago

I have never used Spotify in my life and I resent the notion that I must do so. I consider them part of the race to the bottom I want no part of. I love music, particularly original music that’s a bit different. I dislike a €4 billion company having any monopoly on suggestions and this whole playlists thing is just eye rollingly bad: pay for placement on some guys glorified mixtape? No thanks, I don’t want to discover sycophants that way.

rumori 4y ago

Last time I checked you can only control the official Spotify application on iOS with your own app, wich also means your app has to throw the user into Spotify to be able to start playback and then Spotify kicking it back to your app once playback started. A truly horrible user experience. I think a lot of small music discovery apps will either break or have to fall back to the above experience. My guess is this is the actual reason for the sunsetting, similarly how Twitter cut back the API access back in the day.