epsteingpt
3 days ago
Upvoting for the name only. Great name.
Show HN: Spotatui, a Spotify TUI/GUI without web API rate limits
91 pointsposted 3 days ago
by LargeModGames19 Comments
saintfire
3 days ago
I intend to try this out later in the week, but are you aware ncspot exists?
I've been using it for a few years now and it solves similar issues, using librespot as well. Never had an issue with rate limiting and such. I do have issues where Spotify breaks the client all the time, which I'd imagine this suffers from as well.
Retr0id
3 days ago
I'm a bit confused, are you saying you worked around spotify's ratelimits by using non-spotify APIs to achieve similar things? Why not just RE the official client and use the same APIs it uses? (You can get lossless that way, too!)
LargeModGames
3 days ago
That is basically what I did. Librespot already reverse engineered the spotify client but mainly for playback. I extended my fork to include internal endpoints. These are spclient (extended-metadata, playlist and rootlist, collection, connect-state, lyrics, radio) and Pathfinder GraphQL for search. It doesnt call the public web API (api.spotify.com) anymore so doesnt suffer from those API rate limits.
I looked at lossless too, that is probably possible, but im not going to implement it. It uses a different key system called PlayPlay. If I manage to implement it, it would be considered DRM circumvention and I dont really want to mess with that tbh
daem
3 days ago
What’s your motivation for implementing a third-party Spotify GUI?
LargeModGames
3 days ago
I got into Linux about a year ago and found Spotify-tui but that didn’t work anymore. So I tried to fix it and learn rust at the same time.
A few months ago my dad also wanted to use it but he never opened a terminal before in his life so I build this GUI for him
philipwhiuk
3 days ago
I've never understand the correlation between using Linux and needing to suddenly have everything run in a CLI to the extent of building your own windows in text.
It's like you're not aware Linux has desktop environments.
techgnosis
3 days ago
Not the OP but I would guess its a combination of things
1. The style and motif. I've never met someone who got interested in Linux and didn't immediately appreciate the look and feel of the terminal. People see hackers and fast scrolling text on TV and in movies and it's just fun. Lord knows I was and still am obsessed with CLI and TUI stylings. It brings me joy.
2. It's a lot easier to get started writing a TUI or a CLI. Picking a GUI framework is not easy and many times they are not fun to use. You can only use so many languages to write a GTK app or a QT app. You can use almost any language you want for a CLI tool.
3. CLI and TUI tools are way more universal. I don't have to care if you run GNOME or KDE or if you have GTK-3 or GTK-4 installed or whatever. CLIs and TUIs just work. I can also distribute a single static linked executable instead of a .deb or a Flatpak or something more difficult.
RIMR
2 days ago
Also, you can control it remotely using something lightweight like SSH. VNC is not a great experience most of the time.
Though I usually prefer a webui.
LargeModGames
3 days ago
To be fair it was part looking cool and part that the official client Spotify ships for linux is not the greatest. It looked bad and ofcourse used a lot of RAM, that didnt help when i tried to run it on a very old laptop
slashtom
3 days ago
It's like you're not aware RAM is a precious commodity.
Fire-Dragon-DoL
3 days ago
This sounds a bit like "I have to cut a cucumber, let me use a light saber for this"
ornornor
3 days ago
The light saber is called electron in this metaphor.
jhogendorn
2 days ago
The most important question: does it fix shuffle?
LargeModGames
2 days ago
What do you mean? How is shuffle broken? If you mean that shuffle sometimes plays the same song close after another than no. Spotatui has its own Fisher-Yates shuffle, so there are no repeats untill all songs have been played.
jhogendorn
12 hours ago
Spotify is pretty notorious for having built a custom shuffle algorithm, ostensibly to avoid random turning up things humans perceive as non random, like playing songs by the same artist a few times in a row. But their implementation has always been bad, it seems they maintain an internal 'shuffled' playlist they generate once, so while on shuffle you hear the same songs, in the same order, typically from the top of that hidden playlist, so you only every get the first N etc. Theres also rumours that people have noticed shuffle gets biased according to profit motives. Either way, shuffle on spotify has for a long time been a joke. There used to be tools that would mess with the playlists in just the right ways to get it to redo the hidden shuffled playlist.
fouc
3 days ago
I bet all the new Omarchy users will really appreciate this one!