I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:

- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.

- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?

“Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.”

Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it?

I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?

I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000.

Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently).

I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶

plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry

̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶

docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly

This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.

The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock

Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.

Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.

Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice!

Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!

Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it.

And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway.

[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platf...

I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files.

Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.

All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1.

But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.

Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions.

Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).

Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library.

Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine?

Anyway, cool to see projects like this

For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before.

I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible

Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.

The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.

Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.

As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.

Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist.

Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern".

I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.

Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence

However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses)

[1]: https://slint.dev/

[2]: https://www.egui.rs/

Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?

- would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today.

- Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state

- Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit

- Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode

- Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?

I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.

Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...

https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester

ThreatStop lists the following info:

Severity Level: 5 of 5 Confidence Level: 5 of 5 Risk Level: 4 of 5

I assume this is a false positive, but who can be sure in this day and age...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g

Must be one of THE WORST engineering orgs running right now.

I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.

[1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt

It uses 300 MB of RAM on my MacBook. Saving 50MB of RAM in exchange for losing the ability to play lossless files isn't a trade I want to make.

Cool project though, will keep an eye on it.

Local playback tops out at 320 kbps. Spotify protects its lossless streams with DRM that librespot does not support, and Fastpotify will not circumvent it. This can change if lawful support lands upstream.

I was interested until this bit, and it is a shame. Not the developers issue, but man that's frustrating.

Yes, it's Electron and it's a full browser under the hood, but given the complexity of the UI, it's a fair trade-off.

I'd love to see some like headless Spotify client on macOS.

It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!

And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too.

It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.

What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)

I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.

What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.

The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it?

If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.

I stopped sharing after that.

I'd use it otherwise, this is great.

that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.

It starts in well under a second and typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM.

Hmm, a music player now use much RAM :/

My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it.

Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?

I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.

thanks again for sharing!

How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?