Spot

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

Based on librespot.

Join the discussion on Matrix.

Installing

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!

Login in with Facebook

...is not supported. However, you can update your account in order to be able to log in with a username and password as explained in this issue.

Settings

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

Seek bar warping

It is possible to click on the seek bar to navigate to that position in a song. If you are having issues with this not working you may have gtk-primary-button-warps-slider set to false. In order to fix this issue set the value to true in your gtk configuration.

Scrobbling

Scrobbling is not supported directly by Spot. However, you can use a tool such a rescrobbled (see #85).

Lyrics

Similarly, Spot does not display lyrics for songs, but you can use osdlyrics (see #226).

Gtk theme

Spot uses the dark theme variant by default; this can be changed in the settings.

If you are using the flatpak version, don't forget to install your theme with flatpak as well. See this comment for details.

Similarly, snap also requires that you install the corresponding snap for your theme. See this comment for details.

Features

Only works with premium accounts!

• playback control (play/pause, prev/next, seeking, shuffle, repeat (none, all, song))
• 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
• view album info
• credentials management with Secret Service
• MPRIS integration
• playlist management (creation and edition)
• liked tracks

Planned

• GNOME search provider?
• improved search? (track results)
• recommendations?

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you wish, add yourself to the AUTHORS files when submitting your contribution.

For any large feature/change, please open an issue first to discuss implementation and design decisions.

Translating

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

Please use POEditor to submit translations.

If you feel like it, you are welcome to open a PR to be added to the TRANSLATORS file!

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.

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

Manually

Requires Rust (stable), GTK4, and a couple other things. Also requires libadwaita and blueprint-compiler: they are not packaged on all distros at the moment, you might have to build them yourself!

With meson:

meson target -Dbuildtype=debug -Doffline=false --prefix="$HOME/.local"
ninja install -C target
# to run test/linter/etc
meson test -C target  --verbose

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

Pulling updated strings from POEditor

We are now using POEditor and the wonderful poeditor-sync tool.

poeditor pull

Regenerating sources for flatpak

Using flatpak-cargo-generator.py:

ninja cargo-sources.json -C target

Debugging

Set the RUST_LOG env variable to the appropriate level.

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.