FWIW, this is my rant.<p>I cancelled Spotify last month. I've been a subscriber since 2006.<p>The app has become increasingly buggy, especially on my newish iPad. Frequently would refuse to play for minutes at a time.<p>But more critically, Spotify has become focused on "generating background noise as profitably as possible". I originally liked Spotify as a way of finding interesting albums I haven't listened to before, but now it's all podcasts and easy-listening covers. It's constantly trying to play albums in random order, and even more egregiously, related tracks when the current album finishes.<p>My relationship with music is now more suited to listening to a couple of tracks on any platform, and then buying it from Bandcamp.
It seems like Spotify’s developers are cut off from public input. For example, when the Electron client was released, they removed the standard back/forward keyboard shortcuts native to macOS (cmd+[ and cmd+]). Clearly, this was a regression and a relatively straightforward fix, but the issue was ignored in the community feedback forum because of “lack of popularity.”
Used to work for Spotify back in the days. I was the maintainer of libspotify since its inception (early 2009) and a few years on. TBH I'm surprised it was still being supported up until this day by the backend. Though, some of the earliest hardware integrations were made using libspotify (before the eSDK came about) so I suppose it just had to be kept alive longer than otherwise would have been needed.<p>RIP <3
Too bad to see this go - this was the only API out of the modern streaming services that you could actually use to build something <i>truly</i> new.<p>The new Spotify API (along with others like Apple Music) basically allow you to do <i>some</i> of the things the official players offer for browsing and managing music, and give simplistic playback options - effectively, you can build a Fisher Price version of the official app, following the official app’s template, and that’s about it.<p>I get that it’s all DRM driven, but it really sucks - from Spotify to Netflix and everything in between, we have all these online services with great(ish?) content but terrible UI, bloated embedded browser-based apps and just all around bad user experiences. So much could happen to better these services if they offered open APIs to subscribers.<p>It’s frustrating that we have so many tools for building apps that run everywhere, yet everything seems so increasingly locked down.<p>This should be one of the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity, and yet it feels like it’s becoming one of the most restrictive times.
Kudos to Spotify for supporting libspotify and its use-cases for so many years. I'm sure it hasn't been easy and that copyright owners haven't been very fond of it.
Raspotify uses librespot and should keep working
<a href="https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dtcooper/raspotify</a>
It's really sad as this library has no official replacement. There's libraries like the Web API, but this is a library running on a browser. libspotify allowed playback for custom applications (such as Mopidy[1]).<p>[1] <a href="https://mopidy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mopidy.com/</a>
>What are the alternatives to libspotify<p>Torrents.<p>No, I’m dead serious. How big is your music library? Less than 1TB, isn’t it? Last year I’ve bought 1TB SSD for some 50$.<p>Streaming services for music simply don’t make technical sense anymore. What we need is a mirroring service.
The way I used to find new music was to read reviews in magazines, then buy the album. Later, it was blogs and torrents, but the principle is the same.<p>Using algorithms to discover music works for a lot of people, but I'm not sure that, for me, it ever outperformed just reading what other people said and then listening to the album if it sounded intriguing. It is more labor intensive, but the results were higher quality. Finding one artist I really, really like is worth sifting through a hundred mediocre ones, so whatever process gets me there is the best.<p>I like Spotify for other reasons, like being able to really deep dive into some artist (or some song: just listening to 20 different cover versions obsessively to see who did it best), but even before it was supposedly ruined, I was never blown away by their recommendations to me.
If I’m not mistaken the device I bought to play music in my living room uses libspotify. It’s a closed source device from a manufacturer that never open source stuff. So now I’ll probably end with a glorified cdplayer.
Strongly suggest using the Spotify desktop web client. Content plays in album order. Even on free tier no restrictions for skips or playing specific songs. Ublock origin works just fine but will sometimes need a nudge after a while if it gets stuck on an ad.
Last time I checked you can only control the official Spotify application on iOS with your own app, wich also means your app has to throw the user into Spotify to be able to start playback and then Spotify kicking it back to your app once playback started. A truly horrible user experience.
I think a lot of small music discovery apps will either break or have to fall back to the above experience.
My guess is this is the actual reason for the sunsetting, similarly how Twitter cut back the API access back in the day.
I note there is an archive of libspotify:<p><a href="https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/" rel="nofollow">https://mopidy.github.io/libspotify-archive/</a>
I have never used Spotify in my life and I resent the notion that I must do so. I consider them part of the race to the bottom I want no part of.
I love music, particularly original music that’s a bit different. I dislike a €4 billion company having any monopoly on suggestions and this whole playlists thing is just eye rollingly bad: pay for placement on some guys glorified mixtape?
No thanks, I don’t want to discover sycophants that way.
This is only peripherally related, but if you were using libspotify to work on a a command line client, I have an alternative approach. Shpotify offers command line control of the Spotify app on Macs: <a href="https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify</a>
At least there is still <a href="https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot</a> I just hope they don't rely on libspotify's api endpoints or I need a new solutions for my Raspberry Pi connected speakers.