librespot

librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service, without using the official but closed-source libspotify. Additionally, it will provide extra features which are not available in the official library.

Note: librespot only works with Spotify Premium.

Unmaintained

Unfortunately I am unable to maintain librespot anymore. It should still work, but issues and Pull requests will be ignored. Feel free to fork it and continue development there. If a fork gains traction I will happily point to it from the README.

Building

Rust 1.17.0 or later is required to build librespot.

If you are building librespot on macOS, the homebrew provided rust may fail due to the way in which homebrew installs rust. In this case, uninstall the homebrew version of rust and use rustup, and librespot should then build.

It also requires a C, with portaudio.

On debian / ubuntu, the following command will install these dependencies :

sudo apt-get install build-essential portaudio19-dev

On Fedora systems, the following command will install these dependencies :

sudo dnf install portaudio-devel make gcc

On macOS, using homebrew :

brew install portaudio

Once you've cloned this repository you can build librespot using cargo.

cargo build --release

Usage

A sample program implementing a headless Spotify Connect receiver is provided. Once you've built librespot, run it using :

target/release/librespot --username USERNAME --cache CACHEDIR --name DEVICENAME [--initial-volume 20]

Discovery mode

librespot can be run in discovery mode, in which case no password is required at startup. For that, simply omit the --username argument.

Audio Backends

librespot supports various audio backends. Multiple backends can be enabled at compile time by enabling the corresponding cargo feature. By default, only PortAudio is enabled.

A specific backend can selected at runtime using the --backend switch.

cargo build --features portaudio-backend
target/release/librespot [...] --backend portaudio

The following backends are currently available :

• ALSA
• PortAudio
• PulseAudio

Cross-compiling

A cross compilation environment is provided as a docker image. Build the image from the root of the project with the following command :

$ docker build -t librespot-cross -f contrib/Dockerfile .

The resulting image can be used to build librespot for linux x86_64, armhf (compatible e. g. with Raspberry Pi 2 or 3, but not with Raspberry Pi 1 or Zero) and armel. The compiled binaries will be located in /tmp/librespot-build

docker run -v /tmp/librespot-build:/build librespot-cross

If only one architecture is desired, cargo can be invoked directly with the appropriate options :

docker run -v /tmp/librespot-build:/build librespot-cross cargo build --release --no-default-features --features alsa-backend
docker run -v /tmp/librespot-build:/build librespot-cross cargo build --release --target arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --no-default-features --features alsa-backend
docker run -v /tmp/librespot-build:/build librespot-cross cargo build --release --target arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi --no-default-features --features alsa-backend

Don't forget to set the with-tremor feature flag if your target device does not have floating-point capabilities.

Development

When developing librespot, it is preferable to use Rust nightly, and build it using the following :

cargo build --no-default-features --features "nightly portaudio-backend"

This produces better compilation error messages than with the default configuration.

Disclaimer

Using this code to connect to Spotify's API is probably forbidden by them. Use at your own risk.

Contact

Come and hang out on gitter if you need help or want to offer some. https://gitter.im/sashahilton00/spotify-connect-resources

License

Everything in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.