Listening to Spotify fully open-source way

Hi, in this article I am going to show you how to listen to Spotify using only open-source software.

First of all you need to install those two packages:

• spotifyd
• spotify-qt

Second of all you need to configure spotifyd.

1. Create if not present, and edit the ~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf file.
2. Assign your Spotify nickname to the username variable.
   1. To get your nickname open open.spotify.com.
   2. Click on your profile icon and select Profile.
   3. Click on three dots and select Copy link to profile
   4. https://open.spotify.com/user/themcmaciej?si=496a60d5280d4360 - in place of themcmaciej there will be your nickname
3. Provide your password. There are three ways to do this.
   1. password - just put your password in the config
   2. password_cmd - provide a command that would output on STDOUT your password
      1. You can use the cat command to print your password from the file - cat /.config/spotifyd/.env
   3. use_keyring - your password is being taken from the system's keyring
4. Set bitrate using the bitrate variable
   1. E.g. bitrate = 320
5. Enable cache by setting no_audio_cache = false
6. Set initial_volume to a value between 0 and 100 for your initial volume
   1. If spotifyd -V shows you version lower than 0.4 use string as a value - initial_volume = "45"
   2. If it displays a version equal to or higher than 0.4 use an integer as a value - initial_volume = 45

For example of spotifyd.conf you may want to check out my dotfiles repository.

Last but not least, you need to set up spotify-qt.

1. Go to https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/
2. Create a new app
3. Copy Client ID and Client Secret and enter them in the spotify-qt login screen
4. In the terminal enter the which spotifyd and copy the value
5. Go to Settings > Spotify and enter the copied value in Client Path
6. Check Start with app, go to Configuration and check Use global config
7. In General click the Start client or restart an app.

And that's it, enjoy your fully libre Spotify experience :D

License

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA-4.0)