Spot

Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the GNOME desktop. Only works with premium accounts!

Based on librespot.

Older demo gif

Installing

Package	Maintainer	Repo
	xou816	https://github.com/flathub/dev.alextren.Spot
	popey	https://github.com/popey/spot-snap
	dpeukert	https://gitlab.com/dpeukert/pkgbuilds/tree/main/spot-client

Usage notes

Credentials

It is recommended to install a libsecret compliant keyring application, such as GNOME Keyring (aka seahorse). This will allow saving your password securely between launches.

In GNOME, things should work out of the box. It might be a bit trickier to get it working in other DEs: see this ArchWiki entry for detailed explanations on how to automatically start the daemon with your session.

Bear special attention to the fact that to enable automatic login, you might have to use the same password for your user account and for the keyring, and that the keyring might need to be set as default.

See this comment for more details!

Settings

Spot can also be configured via gsettings if you want to change the audio backend, the song bitrate, etc.

Features

Only works with premium accounts!

• playback control (play/pause, prev/next, seeking)
• play queue with shuffle option
• selection mode: easily browse and select mutliple tracks to queue them
• browse your saved albums and playlists
• search albums and artists
• view an artist's releases
• view users' playlists
• credentials management with Secret Service
• MPRIS integration

Planned

• playlist management (creation and edition)
• liked tracks
• GNOME search provider?
• improved search? (track results, )
• recommendations?

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Translating

Translations are managed using gettext and are available in the po/ subdirectory.

To contribute translations:

• fork the repository;
• copy the po/spot.pot file and rename it to match your language code, or edit the relevant po file if it already exists;
• if needed, add your language code to po/LINGUAS;
• make sur the Language and Plural-Forms keys are correct;
• edit the msgstr entries.

Note that nice tools exist to help you work with po files (Poedit for instance).

If you can't build Spot locally, you may run the spot-snapshots action against your branch from your Github fork (...I think?) to obtain a flatpak debug build.

Building

With GNOME Builder and flatpak

Pre-requisite: install the org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable SDK extension with flatpak. Builder might do this for you automatically, but it will install an older version; make sure the version installed matches the version of the Freedesktop SDK GNOME uses (at the time of writing: 20.08).

Open the project in GNOME Builder and make the dev.alextren.Spot.development.json configuration active. Then build :)

Manually

Requires Rust (stable), GTK3, and a couple other things. Also requires libhandy1: it is not packaged on all distros at the moment, you might have to build it yourself!

Build dependencies on Ubuntu 20.04 for instance: build-essential pkg-config meson libssl-dev libglib2.0-dev-bin libgtk-3-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev.

Then, with meson:

meson target -Dbuildtype=debug -Doffline=false --prefix="$HOME/.local"
ninja install -C target

This will install a .desktop file among other things, and the spot executable will be put in .local/bin (you might want to add it to your path).

To build an optimized release build, use -Dbuildtype=release instead.

Regenerating potfiles

When adding new msgids, don't forget to regenerate/update the potfiles.

ninja spot-pot -C target
ninja spot-update-po -C target

Debugging

Debug builds (flatpak) are available from the master branch on Github (see the spot-snaphots action).

Spot caches images and HTTP responses in ~/.cache/spot.

Spot uses isahc, which uses libcurl, therefore you can set the https_proxy env variable to help with debugging. In debug mode, Spot skips SSL certificate verification.