See you later, Spotify. Music streaming services are interchangeable. This seems to be something Spotify doesn't realise. If Spotify drops support of my Squeezebox devices, then I prefer to subscribe to Deezer than jump through hoops to get Spotty working on my NAS. No hard feelings, but my 20 bucks a month goes elsewhere now. The Squeezebox Touch can also detect music stored on a range of other computers in the house, including high-capacity NAS (network attached storage). The Squeezebox can stream online music and radio stations without the need for your computer to be on, which is where Spotify fits in. Spotify now officially works with the Squeezebox Touch and the Squeezebox Radio (which streams only online.
Please head over to the announcement thread for continued discussion.Here's Spotty, my not fully fleshed out potential next generation Spotify implementation for Squeezebox.
Logitech Squeezebox Touch Manual
Spotty is using the open-source librespot library (https://github.com/plietar/librespot). That library is implemented in a programming language I didn't even know before (Rust). So please prepare for failure and longish bugfix cycles :-). If you're ready to take the risk, here you go:- Add http://www.herger.net/slim-plugins/test.xml to the plugins repository list
- Install Spotty
- Uninstall the official Spotify, Spotify Protocol Handler and Triode's Spotify plugins (if installed)
- Head over to mysqueezebox.com to remove Spotify from your apps
- Restart LMS
- Go to Settings/Advanced/Spotty and follow the instructions
- Use Spotty as you used to use Spotify on SB before.
On platforms other than Windows you should be able to authorize the plugin using your mobile or desktop Spotify application. On Windows unfortunately you'll have to enter username/password (which are NOT stored in LMS).
My kids have been using this plugin for a few weeks now, for hours a day. It sometimes takes a tad longer to buffer the first track. But after that playback seems to be pretty gapless. It does seeking. Doesn't crash when skipping tracks. Isn't limited to a single device. Let's keep fingers crossed it continues to work post Fall '17...
Technically this implementation follows a pretty different approach than the old implementations. Rather than having a daemon run in the background, Spotty is running the helper app for every track. It uses the transcoding framework to pipe the audio data back in to LMS, very much like any file format would do which required transcoding. By default Spotty would stream audio as FLAC. But this can be changed in the file formats settings (PCM or mp3). My office LMS is running on a piCorePlayer based Pi3 installation. CPU load is well below 10% during playback.