Spotify client has interesting history, originally it was very tight, raw win32 I believe, than iirc they transitioned to Qt and finally few iterations of the "modern" web based stack. Fun fact, the original client was developed by the same person as ScummVM, OpenTTD, and original uTorrent.
Your playback quality is still (I consider, severely) restricted[1], among other features I might not be aware of. They might also start injecting ads into the audio stream soon, if they realise ad blocking methods are popular (Twitch has done this for example).
While that is a very funny sentence, the half a cent I'm withholding from the artist by blocking the ad is hardly a robbery.
Just buy a CD once in a while if the guilt is too much to handle.
Spotify is in a weird spot where we have an absolutely fantastic open-source implementation of its client api in Librespot, but exactly 0 upstream support for that api...
The snap is mostly a leftover from before AppImage builds were available, as that was the easiest way for me to package binaries at first. AppImage is now the preferred way to run the application on distros that don't have packages from their native package manager. I'll make sure to update the readme!
Using the Spotify Rest API it is already possible to build nice feature rich Spotify clients for remote players. I don't think there is a supported native playback library? I'm not sure how local playback is implemented in this project.
The main problem I have with the Spotify API is that its remote playback management API is limited/incompatible with some players (Sonos).
It relies on a separate client for playback, which can be an open source client like librespot/spotifyd, or an official client. It's also mostly older systems using the older, deprecated, playback client that aren't compatible with the Web API afaik.
Haven't noticed any issues like that under Windows, so please open an issue with more details. You can also try either enabling a native window handle from "Settings > Interface > General > Use native window", or enable a native window frame from "Settings > Interface > Title bar > Disable Application title bar".
I'll also see if I can implement something like that!
Only devices exposing to the Web API, and logged in with the same account, are currently supported. If you know that a device you're trying to use is exposed, please open an issue with more details.
on macOS, unfortunately, this was a painful experience. on startup, after setting up the Spotify app keys, the app froze while refreshing (audio) devices. it slowed down, stopped working, and had to be force quit.
I was looking forward to a snazzy spotify desktop ui!
That's also my experience with the official clients after their recent big update. It constantly crashed and did all sorts of weird stuff so I uninstalled it and have started using their web client for playback + a quick and dirty GUI for their API to fill in some of the missing features like playing a playlist sorted by last added, proper random shuffle, actually stop playing when queue ends, etc.
This project looks good though, will have to try it later and see if it works any better for me.
No, it uses librespot which is a open re-implementation of libspotify, which was Spotify's old, but now pulled, SDK. The risk however is that when Spotify thinks it's no longer worth supporting older harder devices that rely on the original libspotify, they'll pull the endpoints and remove functionality (already happened to search, for example, but they could use the newer APIs for that - it's going to be hard when they do it with playback, as the new APIs require DRM).
The client itself only uses the official API, and is perfectly safe to use. Playback clients like librespot clearly state that they are "probably forbidden" in their readmes however, so that may be different.
I quit Spotify when I found out they don't have a "block song" feature on the desktop app. They have it on their mobile app, but it only applies locally to that device.
Realized I was paying for YouTube premium, which comes with Music included. Better deal IMO.
