The Problem

A while ago I noticed that the fans in my laptop became loud even while I wasn’t doing any computing-heavy tasks. I got curious about this and started to monitor the CPU-usage of the running processes. It turned out that the process that used the most of my CPU was the official Spotify client.

I usually have Spotify configured so that it autostarts with the system. Even though I’m listening to the music on my smartphone I need to have the PC client open so that the current song title gets displayed in my status bar. This way I can leave my phone in the pocket and still see on my laptop which song is currently playing.

After doing a bit of googling I found out that the desktop client for Spotify is not very optimized and especially the advertisement banners on the home screen (which I had open most of the time) need a lot of CPU power. Additionally the Linux client isn’t a very passionate project from the developers at Spotify and gets rarely updated.

Because I don’t want to have such a CPU and battery hungry process constantly running on my laptop I decided to find a more lightweight replacement for the official client. In this post I will present my solution and give a overview of how to configure your system so that you get the following features:

• use a command-line interface to search and play music just like you would do in on any other client.
• get the current song title displayed on whatever window manager bar you are using
• control the music through keyboard shortcuts
• all of the above, no matter on which device the music is actually playing

The Solution

After I spent way to much time on testing out all different kinds of configurations I found a solution that I’m happy with. The core elements of this solution are:

• the spotifyd client.
• the spotPRIS2 dbus interface.
• the spotify-tui command-line interface.
• the spotify_status.py script which was originally written by Jvanhijn as a module for polybar but works for everything else just as well. I have adapted it a bit so that it uses the spotPRIS2 interface instead of the official Spotify interface.

All of these projects are open-source and the installation instructions can be found on Github. The spotify_status.py script can be placed anywhere and should be made executable:

chmod +x ./spotify_status.py

After all the software is installed there is some configuration to do:

Set up a Spotify device with spotifyd

First we have to create a Spotify device that can play music and that appears on other Spotify clients. For this we use spotifyd. You can find an example configuration file for spotifyd on my Github repository. This has to be placed at ~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf .

To let spotifyd log into your spotify account you have to choose some form of authentication in the config file. I recommend using a keyring which requires you to make a new keyring entry. The entry needs to have specific attributes which is described on the spotifyd Github

Now just start and enable the spotifyd service with systemd:

$ systemctl --user start spotifyd.service
$ systemctl --user enable spotifyd.service

Spotify Interface

To control the music with commands and to get information about the current song we need to have some kind of dbus interface.

After some testing I found the built-in spotifyd dbus interface to be instable and unreliable, that’s why I decided to use the spotPRIS2 interface instead. The only downside of spotPRIS2 that I could find is that the name of the dbus interface seems to be randomly generated and changes from time to time. That’s why I had to make the selection of that device robust against this change.

But first we need to make spotifyd and spotPRIS2 autostart with the system. For that I use their systemd services. To tell spotPRIS2 for which device it should create an interface you need to add a parameter to the spotpris2.service file located at /usr/lib/systemd/user/spotpris2.service For that just change the line containing ExecStart:

%%/usr/lib/systemd/user/spotpris2.service

ExecStart=/usr/bin/spotpris2 -d='{your systemd spotify device}'

The device name has to be the exact same as in your spotifyd.conf file!

To make this setup robust against the random name changes from spotpris2, I decided to declare a global variable that I can read whenever I want to contact the interface. This can be done by including this snippet in your ~/.xinitrc file (or whichever file your system reads on startup).

dbus_interface=$(dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames | grep spotpris)
tmp=${dbus_interface##*.}
export SPOTPRIS_INTERFACE=${tmp%\"}

With this you can bind your multimedia keys to control your music. It depends on your window manager how to configure this. The relevant keys and commands are:

# Play/Pause
Key: XF86AudioPlay
Command: dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotpris.$SPOTPRIS_INTERFACE /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

# Next song
Key: XF86AudioNext
Command: dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotpris.$SPOTPRIS_INTERFACE /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next

# Previous song
Key: XF86AudioPrev
Command: dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotpris.$SPOTPRIS_INTERFACE /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous

spotify-tui

If you want a nice GUI to select and control music I highly recommend spotify-tui. It has all the functionality you need for listening to your Spoitfy playlists or browse music without the annoying adds and recommendation from the official Spotify client. The setup is a bit tricky since you need to insert your spotify api key. But this process is explained very well on the project’s Github page.

Integration into the statusbar

If you want to get the current song title displayed in your status bar, you can just execute the spotify_status.py script and it will return the song title as a string. It also takes arguments to customize the output. This way the song status can easily be implemented in basically every status bar and window manager.

Conclusion

Wth these tools you have all the functionality from the official Spotify client minus the annoying ads and minus the high CPU usage. In my testing I found that all programs running simultaneously are barely using any CPU or RAM which is a huge improvement over the original setup.