# Spotify

Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.

This Internet music service allows you to select any song in its database and stream for free. The service was recently introduced to the United States after previously being exclusive to Europe. The Linux client is only officially packaged for Debian and Fedora distributions, but is also available in the AUR: spotifyAUR. Officially, they recommend that Linux users run the windows client under Wine. There are also the occasional voice ads in between songs for users who do not wish to subscribe.

Spotify also offers free users the ability to create playlist which can be shuffled, and set to repeat tracks. Content provided by Spotify comes in explicit versions as well as censored.

## Client installation

Choose which client you would prefer. The Linux client is receiving good reviews. However, if you are comfortable with wine and its configuration, you might want to choose the windows client. Please note that you do NOT need to install both. Some opensource clients exist, such as mopidy + mopidy-spotifyAUR or despotify-svnAUR, most of which work only with premium accounts. There is also the online player (requires flash) on https://play.spotify.com/.

### Linux

spotifyAUR from the AUR will automatically download the software. If you wish to play local files you will need to install ffmpeg-compat as well.

### Windows (Wine)

See Wine.

Obtaining Spotify can be done by registering for an account on their Website, the application does not offer in-app registration. However you can obtain the application prior to registering by using the following URL. [1]

After you have registered and downloaded your copy of the installer you will need to run the application through Wine, depending on your setup you may be able to run the application by right clicking the file. If not terminal will work just fine, as long as you run the below command in the directory of your download.

    $ wine Spotify\ Installer.exe

Once the application is successfully installed you may run Spotify by using one of the following commands in terminal, or in the ALT+F2 launcher:

If you use a x86_64 copy of ArchLinux, you will have to run it like this:

    $ wine "/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Spotify/spotify.exe"

If you use a x86 copy of ArchLinux, you can use this command just fine:

    $ wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Spotify/spotify.exe

If you have any additional problems, I recommend setting the winecfg to Windows XP or Windows 7 emulation.

## Global media hotkeys

Spotify has support for media keys like `XF86AudioPlay`, but out of the box they only work inside Spotify. We can use for example xbindkeys to catch the global media keypresses, and then forward them to Spotify using one of the methods below.

### Linux

#### Playerctl

The playerctlAUR utility provides a command line tool to send commands to the Spotify process. The only commands you will likely need to bind globally are `play-pause`, `next` and `previous`

    $ playerctl play-pause
    $ playerctl next
    $ playerctl previous

Playerctl will send the command to the first player it finds, so this method will also work with others players such as vlc. To ignore other players, pass `--player=spotify` as an argument.

#### xdotool

With the help of `xdotool` it is possible to send your hotkeys to the application. The following script is an example of how to control Spotify from the outside:

    #!/bin/sh

    case $1 in
       "play")
           key="XF86AudioPlay"
           ;;
       "next")
           key="XF86AudioNext"
           ;;
       "prev")
           key="XF86AudioPrev"
           ;;
       *)
           echo "Usage: $0 play|next|prev"
           exit 1
            ;;
    esac
    xdotool key --window $(xdotool search --name "Spotify (Premium |Unlimited |Free )?- Linux Preview"|head -n1) $key
    exit 0

Let us call it `musickeys.sh`. Make the script executable:

    $ chmod +x musickeys.sh

By executing `./musickeys.sh play` you can now toggle playing a song. Now you can bind this script to any tool that catches keypresses, such as xbindkeys.

#### D-Bus

An alternative to the above is D-Bus, which should be available by default as it is a dependency of systemd. With D-Bus we have a consistent and reliable way to communicate with other processes, such as Spotify.

To play or pause the current song in Spotify:

    $ dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

In order to bind this and the other commands to the media keys you need to install Xbindkeys and edit your .xbindkeysrc and add the following lines:

    # Play/Pause
    "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause"
    XF86AudioPlay

    # Next
    "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next"
    XF86AudioNext

    # Previous
    "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous"
    XF86AudioPrev

    # Stop
    "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Stop"
    XF86AudioStop

If the above commands do not work, try setting the dbus address:

     USER=`whoami`
     PROCESS=spotify
     PID=`pgrep -o -u $USER $PROCESS`
     ENVIRON=/proc/$PID/environ
     if [ -e $ENVIRON ]
     then
         export `grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS $ENVIRON`
     else
         echo "Unable to set DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS."
         exit 1
     fi

### Windows

If you prefer the wine-version of Spotify, you can use spotifycmdAUR to send actions to Spotify. Here is a sample setup of xmonad bindings using spotifycmd.

## Tips & Tricks

### Disable track notifications

Note: It is worth noting that if you have a SpotCommanderAUR Server running alongside Spotify, and you disable track notifications by following the instructions below, the SpotCommander Client running on your mobile device will display that “No Music is Playing” and will fail to display track info such as title, artist, album art, etc. Apart from that, the mobile client still works fine though, and is still able to skip, play, pause, control volume, etc.

After version 0.9.10, track change notifications were enabled by default. They can be quite intrusive. To disable them, add the following line to `~/.config/spotify/Users/<spotifylogin>-user/prefs`

     ui.track_notifications_enabled=false

It is also possible to launch spotify with the `--ui.track_notifications_enabled=false` option.

### Show track notifications

playerctlAUR provides a library you can use with python-gobject and a notification daemon such as dunst to show the artist and title in a notification when the track changes.

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

    from gi.repository import Playerctl, GLib
    from subprocess import Popen

    player = Playerctl.Player()

    def on_track_change(player, e):
        track_info = '{artist} - {title}'.format(artist=player.get_artist(), title=player.get_title())
        Popen(['notify-send', track_info])

    player.on('metadata', on_track_change)

    GLib.MainLoop().run()

### Skip overplayed radio tracks

Another use of the playerctlAUR library is to skip tracks that are played too much on radio when you do not necessarily want to downvote these tracks because you may want to hear them again later on that station.

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

    from gi.repository import Playerctl, GLib

    player = Playerctl.Player()

    played_out = ['Zu Fuss', 'Walk And Talk', 'Neuland']

    def on_track_change(player, e):
        if player.get_title() in played_out:
            player.next()

    player.on('metadata', on_track_change)

    GLib.MainLoop().run()

### Mute commercials

With blockify you can mute commercials (works on both the Wine version and the native Linux client). It is available in the AUR as blockifyAUR.

To have this start and run in the background every time Spotify starts you will need to automate this yourself:

    #!/bin/sh

    spotify=/usr/bin/spotify

    if [[ -x $spotify && -x /usr/bin/blockify ]];
    then
      blockify &
      block_pid=$!
      $spotify
      trap "kill -9 $block_pid" SIGINT SIGTERM EXIT
    fi

By placing this script at `/usr/local/bin/spotify`, it gets preferred to `/usr/bin/spotify` everytime you start Spotify, so there's nothing else to change and updates won't break it.

### Remote Control

#### Send commands via SSH

If you set up ssh on the server, you can send controls from a client to a remote Spotify instance with

    $ ssh user@host yourcommand

where yourcommand can be spotifycmdAUR that you installed on the server, or a dbus script for the linux version, as described above.

#### Grab the Spotify window via SSH

Aside from grabbing the whole desktop with TeamViewer or VNC to remotely control your server, you can also only grab the Spotify Window from the server to your client.

To do that, you need to configure sshd on your server and install x11vnc on both server and client as well as tigervnc on the client. Then you can use these scripts to grab either the complete dektop or only the Spotify window, which essentially gets you GUI client-like behavior as with MPD.

    #!/bin/bash
    # vncget.sh

    if [[ $1 == all ]];then
      ssh -f -t -L 5900:localhost:5900 user@host "x11vnc -q -display :0 -auth .Xauthority"
    else
      ssh -f -t -L 5900:localhost:5900 user@host ".bin/vncgetspotify.sh"
    fi

    for i in {1..4}; do
      sleep 2
      if vncviewer localhost:0; then break; fi
    done

    #!/bin/bash
    # vncgetspotify.sh

    export DISPLAY=:0

    id=$(wmctrl -lx | awk '/spotify.exe.Wine/ {print $1}')
    [[ -z $id ]] && id=$(wmctrl -lx | awk '/spotify.Spotify/ {print $1}')

    x11vnc -sid $id -display :0 -auth .Xauthority

You will need to copy the second script to ~/.bin/vncgetspotify.sh on the server and the first script to any place on your client.

Finally, to grab the spotify window, run on the client:

    $ sh vncget.sh

or, for the whole desktop:

    $ sh vncget.sh all

## Troubleshooting

### Blinking images and improper rendering while using Spotify Linux with DWM

Start spotify as a floating window.

You can add this rule to the rules array in your `config.h`:

     { "Spotify",     NULL,       NULL,        2,         True,     -1 },

This will tell dwm to start spotify as a floating window associated with the tag "2" no matter what window mode you are in. Recompile and install dwm to apply your new settings.

### Broken search, browsing or radio

  Spotify bug report concerning non-english locales

If various tabs like browsing only show a blank screen, the search field doesn't seem to do anything or the radio page is broken (stuck when starting and unsresponsive to input) you might be using a custom locale.

Try setting the environment variable `LC_NUMERIC` to `en_US.utf8` before starting Spotify.

### Spotify will not play local files

This can manifest in a very unusual manner like some songs not playing when you try to stream them because the player attempts to play them from the hard drive.

Try installing ffmpeg-compat, as per this forum discussion.

### SpotifyHelper.exe crashes (Windows client)

If SpotifyHelper.exe crashes when starting Spotify, disable the d3d9 library with `winecfg`. Go to the "Libraries" tab, choose "d3d9" and click Add. To disable it, click edit and select the "Disable" option.

### Wrong launcher icon (Windows client)

If the Spotify icon does not show up correctly in your launcher, add the following line to `~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Spotify.desktop`:

    StartupWMClass=spotify.exe

### Pulseaudio

See PulseAudio/Troubleshooting and [2]

### Album art and images are missing, show up as squares; with proxy

Quit spotify, then open spotify preferences `~/.config/spotify/prefs`

Change @https to @http:

     network.proxy.addr="your-proxy.com:80@http"
     network.proxy.mode=2

See original form post here.

### Spotify does not detect other devices on local network

If a firewall is in place, open ports 57621 for UDP and TCP. If you use a variant of the iptables Simple stateful firewall, the following should do it:

    iptables -A TCP -p tcp --dport 57621 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify
    iptables -A UDP -p udp --dport 57621 -j ACCEPT -m comment --comment spotify

It is also possible to restrict the source and destination to the local network.

### Search Bar text is invisible when using a dark theme

The text in the search bar appears to be hardcoded to be white, making it invisible when using a dark Qt theme. To fix this, you'll need to make an override.

First create a css file somewhere your account has permission to read/write from (such as your home folder). Call it whatever you like (eg. spotify-override.css).

Open the newly created css file and add the following:

    QLineEdit { color: #000 }

Save the file and exit. Next, you need to add the following to the end of your Spotify launcher (substitute the path with the actual path of your css file):

    -stylesheet=/home/user/spotify-overide.css

So your full launch path should look something like this:

    /usr/share/spotify/spotify-client/spotify -stylesheet=/home/user/spotify-override.css

## See also

- playerctl: A command-line utility and library for controlling media players
- SpotCommander: A web based remote control for Spotify
- http://www.spotify.com/int/help/faq/wine/
- http://www.spotify.com/int/download/previews/

Categories:

- Multimedia players
- Wine