Running Spotify From a Terminal

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 09:36:34 +0100

This post exist of two different projects, the first one is Spotify-tui, and de second is Spotifyd.

Spotify-tui

Spotify-tui is a terminal interface using the web API and is witten in the Rust language, however, it does not play the songs itself. It only uses the API to select/play a song, you’ll need another piece of the puzzle to actually play the music.

Since Spotify-tui is written in Rust it’s very memory efficient and safe, meaning it will never do unexpected things. Running Spotify-tui it only uses 16MB of RAM and it has been running for 11+ hours.

You may argue that 16MB of RAM is a lot, but in the world of applications and even command line applications running on JavaScript it’s a godsend. Spotify itself is around 200MB.

Spotifyd

The other part of the puzzle is Spotifyd, a Spotify daemon written in Rust. It’s a tiny Spotify client using only around 8MB of RAM. However, Spotifyd is not just specifically for Spotify-tui, it’s a generic daemon. You could also use your Spotify app and stream it to the daemon using the device list in the app.

This means you could create your own smart speaker for cheap! Or you could hook up a raspberry pi zero to your old sound system and give your old system new streaming functionalities.

spotify-tui on Kevin Heruer

Running Spotify From a Terminal

Spotify-tui

Spotifyd