Open Source Spotify client library

Current maintainers are listed on GitHub.

librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver. It is an alternative to the official and now deprecated closed-source libspotify. Additionally, it will provide extra features which are not available in the official library.

Note: librespot only works with Spotify Premium. This will remain the case. We will not support any features to make librespot compatible with free accounts, such as limited skips and adverts.

We're available on crates.io as the librespot package. Simply run cargo install librespot to install librespot on your system. Check the wiki for more info and possible usage options.

After installation, you can run librespot from the CLI using a command such as librespot -n "Librespot Speaker" -b 160 to create a speaker called Librespot Speaker serving 160 kbps audio.

As the origin by plietar is no longer actively maintained, this organisation and repository have been set up so that the project may be maintained and upgraded in the future.

Documentation is currently a work in progress, contributions are welcome!

There is some brief documentation on how the protocol works in the docs folder.

COMPILING.md contains detailed instructions on setting up a development environment, and compiling librespot. More general usage and compilation information is available on the wiki. CONTRIBUTING.md also contains our contributing guidelines.

If you wish to learn more about how librespot works overall, the best way is to simply read the code, and ask any questions you have in our Gitter Room.

We have recently started using Github discussions for general questions and feature requests, as they are a more natural medium for such cases, and allow for upvoting to prioritize feature development. Check them out here. Bugs and issues with the underlying library should still be reported as issues.

If you run into a bug when using librespot, please search the existing issues before opening a new one. Chances are, we've encountered it before, and have provided a resolution. If not, please open a new one, and where possible, include the backtrace librespot generates on crashing, along with anything we can use to reproduce the issue, e.g. the Spotify URI of the song that caused the crash.

A quick walkthrough of the build process is outlined below, while a detailed compilation guide can be found here.

We recently switched to using Rodio for audio playback by default, hence for macOS and Windows, you should just be able to clone and build librespot (with the command below). For Linux, you will need to run the additional commands below, depending on your distro.

On Debian/Ubuntu, the following command will install these dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev

On Fedora systems, the following command will install these dependencies:

sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel make gcc

librespot currently offers the following selection of audio backends:

Rodio (default)
ALSA
GStreamer
PortAudio
PulseAudio
JACK
JACK over Rodio
SDL
Pipe
Subprocess

Please check the corresponding Compiling entry on the wiki for backend specific dependencies.

Once you've installed the dependencies and cloned this repository you can build librespot with the default backend using Cargo.

cargo build --release

librespot is also available via official package system on various operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD. Repology offers a good overview.

A sample program implementing a headless Spotify Connect receiver is provided. Once you've built librespot, run it using :

target/release/librespot --name DEVICENAME

The above is a minimal example. Here is a more fully fledged one:

target/release/librespot -n "Librespot" -b 320 -c ./cache --enable-volume-normalisation --initial-volume 75 --device-type avr

The above command will create a receiver named Librespot, with bitrate set to 320 kbps, initial volume at 75%, with volume normalisation enabled, and the device displayed in the app as an Audio/Video Receiver. A folder named cache will be created/used in the current directory, and be used to cache audio data and credentials.

A full list of runtime options is available here.

Please Note: When using the cache feature, an authentication blob is stored for your account in the cache directory. For security purposes, we recommend that you set directory permissions on the cache directory to 700.

Come and hang out on gitter if you need help or want to offer some: https://gitter.im/librespot-org/spotify-connect-resources

Using this code to connect to Spotify's API is probably forbidden by them. Use at your own risk.

Everything in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.

This is a non exhaustive list of projects that either use or have modified librespot. If you'd like to include yours, submit a PR.

• librespot-golang - A golang port of librespot.
• plugin.audio.spotify - A Kodi plugin for Spotify.
• raspotify - A Spotify Connect client that mostly Just Works™
• Spotifyd - A stripped down librespot UNIX daemon.
• rpi-audio-receiver - easy Raspbian install scripts for Spotifyd, Bluetooth, Shairport and other audio receivers
• Spotcontrol - A golang implementation of a Spotify Connect controller. No playback functionality.
• librespot-java - A Java port of librespot.
• ncspot - Cross-platform ncurses Spotify client.
• ansible-role-librespot - Ansible role that will build, install and configure Librespot.
• Spot - Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the GNOME desktop.
• Snapcast - synchronised multi-room audio player that uses librespot as its source for Spotify content