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Hutspot

Warning

First a warning. A major problem is the audio getting choppy due to the phone being suspended when the display goes dark. Currently this is solved using a DBus call to powerd (requestSysState) by Hutspot when it is playing a track. If Hutspot crashes or quits it might not have notified powerd but powerd takes care of that (says wiki. Now I still need to find a way to get the app resumed to update the media controls (being an Mpris player).

But getting all this trickery working is too much asked for now so it is best you just use UT Tweak Tool and prevent app suspension for Hutspot.

Librespot

Librespot is a Spotify Connect player written in Rust. Hutspot has som extra functionality to use Librespot and reuse it’s authorization data.

This is how I use it.

Librespot can save the credentials and reuse them later. To create them run once on the command line:

librespot -n Phablet --cache ~/.cache/hutspot.wdehoog/hutspot.wdehoog/ -u <yourusername>

you will be prompted for your password. The credentials will be saved in the specified cache directory in a file called credentials.json. Note: if this directory is accessible by hutspot it can use the credentials to register itself with other players. Ofcourse ~/.cache/hutspot.wdehoog/hutspot.wdehoog/ is such a directory.

When launching Librespot and specifying the same cache directory the credentials will be loaded:

librespot -n Phablet --device-type smartphone -b 320 --backend alsa --device pulse --cache ~/.cache/hutspot.wdehoog/hutspot.wdehoog/

I have a script that launches Librespot with the correct settings and setup an upstart job to start/stop it. The file is /home/phablet/.config/upstart/librespot.conf and contains:

description "Librespot"

exec /home/phablet/librespot/launch.sh

As you see the script and the Librespot executable are located in /home/phablet/librespot/.

The contents of launch.sh is:

#!/bin/sh

export PULSE_PROP='media.role=multimedia'

LIBRESPOT_DIR=/home/phablet/librespot

$LIBRESPOT_DIR/librespot -n Phablet --device-type smartphone -b 320 --enable-volume-normalisation --backend alsa --device pulse --cache ~/.cache/hutspot.wdehoog/hutspot.wdehoog/

If everything is setup correctly you can now do start librespot and stop librespot to start/stop the service. Hutspot can do this as well.

Spotifyd

Another option is to install spotifyd on your phone. It’s releases contain binaries for armhf. For example I used 0.2.19 from spotifyd-2019-10-06-armv6-slim.zip on by opo.

This version does not have the pulseaudio backend. It will still work but you will have to take care of setting an environment variable in order for the volume controls to work:

#!/bin/sh

export PULSE_PROP='media.role=multimedia'
./spotifyd

The easiest way to set it up is creating a config file as described in the README from spotifyd.

Config file

Spotifyd expects it’s config file in ~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf’. It can be overriden though (--config-path). Mine contains:

username = xxxxx
password = xxxxx

backend = alsa
device = pulse
control = pulse
mixer = Master
volume_controller = alsa

device_name = Phablet
bitrate = 320
cache_path = /home/phablet/.cache/spotifyd
no_audio_cache = true

volume_normalisation = true
normalisation_pregain = -10
zeroconf_port = 1234

I have put my spotify credentials in the config file. This is not mandatory. The Spotifyd website mentions other ways of authentication.

Remarks

I tried to crossbuild spotifyd with it’s pulseaudio backend but it fails. If you know how to fix that please let me know.

Raspotify

Raspotify is Librespot build for the RaspberryPI. I tested version 0.15.0 and started it from the console with:

librespot -n Phablet --device-type smartphone -b 320 -u <yourusername> --enable-volume-normalisation

you will be prompted for your password.

Librespot-java

I also tried Librespot-java using jre/jkd from Oracle and OpenJDK. It is a really great player I use on raspberry pi but unfortunately it makes my phone reboot instantly.