RaspberryPi Streamers & Spotify

[chuckt62]

I’ve been running Volumio on an old Pi2b for a couple months now and was getting ready to pull the trigger on the latest offer (3 months free). Unfortunately I see that the Volumio Spotify plugin is now broken. Apparently Spotify shut down some API libraries and at least some of the code needs to be rewritten.

Anyway, I’m wondering if any of the other Pi streamer OS‘s were affected. They would have quit working on the 16th when the Libs were shut down. As far as I can tell, only premium accounts would be affected and then exhibiting login failures.

 

[msmucr]

No issues here, just checked songs, albums, podcasts, playlists, shuffle etc.. I'm not really aware of any significant change at Spotify API, which would generally break 3rd party client access.
However I'm not sure how exactly the Volumio plugin is done.

There is quite a few of different plugins for media servers and Linux daemons (eg. services) which provides Spotify connect. But vast majority of ones are based on the common library, which is called librespot. I does heavy lifting and its just wrapped for various uses. I'd guess, that Volumio plugin for Spotify uses it as well.

GitHub - librespot-org/librespot: Open Source Spotify client library

Open Source Spotify client library. Contribute to librespot-org/librespot development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

The different alternative implementation is called librespot-java

GitHub - librespot-org/librespot-java: The most up-to-date open source Spotify client

The most up-to-date open source Spotify client. Contribute to librespot-org/librespot-java development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

As its name suggest, it's completely written in Java and requires JRE to run.

At project pages are no fresh reports about some seriously broken compatibility.
As I've mentioned, both works fine for me (I'm using it at different Raspberry Pi machines, both runs as manually installed packages at normal Raspberry Pi OS - no special media player Linux distribution like Volumio, Moode or so).

So if you have issues, it's likely directly related to particular Volumio plugin and you should report about your problems there.

Michal

 

[chuckt62]

Librespot is still good. Libspotify was deprecated.

Long story short, our plan to solve this is:

• Enquire quickly some plugins developers to see if they want to jump in and help fix this (volunteers welcomed, please PM me if interested).
• If in the short term there is no community developer to help, the core Volumio team will hand-over this plugin maintenance. While we have some ideas on how to restore this functionality, it’s not certain that we will be able to do it: when we have to integrate with third party APIs, we need to rely on those APIs to be accessible and actually working, which is not always the case.
• Since ETA in both options will not be until a month (at least), in the meantime I encourage everyone to use Spotify Connect plugin. If you need to browse trough, LMS plugin is a valid alternative as skirkwood points out.

Spotify wont accept my username and password again

Hi Guys, thanks to all of you who contributed to this thread, both with developer’s suggestions and with comments. The situation is exactly as Skirkwood described: we use a mix of Spotify Web API (for browsing) and SPOPD daemon for playback (which is the failing part now, since libspotify has...

community.volumio.org

 

[msmucr]

Librespot is still good. Libspotify was deprecated.

Libspotify was original official library and accompanying API, which was provided by Spotify themselves. It was marked as deprecated maybe six or seven years ago. No wonder it doesn't work anymore.
If the plugin uses Libspotify.. then someone haven't touched it for reeeally long time .

 

[msmucr]

Ohh.. just found the official press release from Spotify

Sunset of libspotify on May 16, 2022

We will be disabling access to libspotify on May 16, 2022. After that date, integrations that still use libspotify will stop working.

developer.spotify.com

Anyway, I've also briefly looked to Volumio plugins and it seems, the Vollibrespot and older Volspotconnect2 are both based on librespot.

GitHub - ashthespy/Vollibrespot: Spotify Connect daemon for Volumio

Spotify Connect daemon for Volumio . Contribute to ashthespy/Vollibrespot development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

volumio-plugins/plugins/music_service/volspotconnect2 at master · volumio/volumio-plugins

Contribute to volumio/volumio-plugins development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

So those shouldn't be affected by that..

 

[msmucr]

Thanks for added link to your reply. All makes sense now, the plugin, which is directly integrated into Volumio UI is broken. Spotify Connect plugin works, Volumio guys even mentioned it as a workaround.

When I tried Volumio couple years ago, I've tested both variants (both were working back then) and still ended on the Spotify Connect plugin. Sure, you couldn't mix and match Spotify tunes with local music with that, but on the other hand all searches and browsing was so much smoother with Spotify app on phone or tablet, that it won for me.