- Spotify Web Player
- Spotify Desktop App Electron Configuration
- Electron Desktop App
- Is Spotify An Electron App
- Spotify Desktop App Electron
- Spotify Desktop Player
The migration was amazeballz. I thought I would have to uninstall Spotify after installing this but no, I didn't have to. Unfortunately the app itself is slow and just feels clunky. It is an electron app and electron apps are separate instances of Chromium. The lack of screen off playback is bad too but that is Microsoft's fault and not Spotify's. Spotify App For Mac Os Widget Avaya App For Mac Laptop. This tutorial will show you how to start building your first desktop apps with Electron and React.
Electron apps are a plague. If you’ve ever wondered why:
- your computer chugs to a halt once more than two of {Slack, Discord, Skype, Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, GitHub Desktop, Steam, VS Code} are open on the same machine
- scrolling, or playing a GIF or whatever in those apps, is incredibly laggy
- every app download is now 100MB+
- the typing shortcuts you’re used to in macOS Just Don’t Work
then it’s likely that Electron is to blame. I’m writing this blog post on a maxed-out 2016 13” MacBook Pro, and it can barely keep up with all these Electron apps I need to keep running. We can only speculate why all these large companies with enormous engineering resources cannot use the money that I pay them for their services to make software that doesn’t suck, but that’s for another blog post.
Lately I’ve gotten especially annoyed at all of the Electron-based junk running on my machine, since I have to work from home, which means needing to use Docker to run or test out various Linux things, which is another 2 gigs of my laptop’s precious memory eaten away. I decided to look for non-Electron alternative clients for all of those. Enter spotifyd and spotify-tui. After switching software, I have an extra half-gig of memory that isn’t being wasted running yet another instance of Chromium.
In this blog post, I’ll show you how to set up these on your macOS machine. I assume basic familiarity with managing your machine via Terminal. You’ll also need a Spotify Premium account for any of this to work. The wood chipper that is modern society can’t operate without sacrificing a few limbs!
Installing and configuring spotifyd
This is an always-on service (hence the d in its name, for daemon) that will wait in the background and play music requested by whatever Spotify client we choose; in this case, spotify-tui.
First, get spotifyd installed. I’ve added it to Homebrew already, so if you need to get that set up first, go ahead.
You’ll need to create a configuration file named ~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf that specifies your login information and other details. You can read the full instructions, but I’ve annotated my own configuration here:
Create and edit this file with vim, or whatever text editor you prefer:
Next you’ll need to add your password to the system password manager. You can do this via the Keychain Access app, or just right in the Terminal:
Be sure to use your Spotify username here, not your macOS username. You can confirm that it was added correctly by opening up Keychain Access and searching for spotifyd.
Why does Spotify say my email is invalid?A. Go with your real email address. Block all spotify app ads android. First, make sure you are not already logged in to another account. It may also help to link your Spotify to your Apple or Facebook accounts.The other reason might be you are using the temporary mail which is not legal so don’t try that. After that, make sure to confirm if the username and password you are using are correct.
This should be all the configuring you need to do. To test if it worked, first run spotifyd as just a plain app. After you run the following command, grant spotifyd access to the macOS Keychain and Firewall in the pop up that appears:
If everything worked correctly, you should similar output to what I have above. Open the official Spotify client on your phone or laptop, and confirm that there’s a new device in Spotify Connect:
Press CTRL-C to stop spotifyd. Now we’ll use brew services to to run spotifyd in the background:
If you still see spotifyd show up in Spotify Connect, it worked!
Installing and configuring spotify-tui
The Terminal app spotify-tui is how you’ll actually control spotifyd by showing you playlists and giving you playback controls and so on. There’s not that much involved, as the app itself will give you instructions that you can follow quite easily.
You’ll have to click through the Spotify Developer agreement and copy and paste some stuff, but it’s nothing too onerous. Just remember to say you’re making a non-commercial app, and set the “Redirect URI” in the Spotify Developer dashboard and everything should be peachy.
If you’ve set everything up correctly you should see the text interface pop up like so:
To be honest, I used it for a bit, and then decided that I didn’t really like text-mode interfaces all that much. Instead, I just control Spotify from my phone via Spotify Connect, so this hasn’t gotten that much use. Maybe one day I’ll teach myself Swift and write a native macOS Spotify Connect player…
But I’m on Linux!
I dunno, on Linux you’re generally expected to figure things out on your own, so maybe try apt install spotifyd spotify-tui followed by sudo systemctl start spotifyd and see if that works ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Is this all legal?
Probably not. While it would be pretty weird for Spotify to sue or ask to imprison their own paying customers, I can’t predict how Spotify’s CEO might aim to Maximize Shareholder Value in the future.
If you found this post useful, please consider supporting my work with a glass of wine 🍷.
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While we weren’t watching, over the last two years the web has quickly begun swallowing the desktop environment whole. If you’re an average user, you probably have a few desktop apps that you use daily without even realizing they’re built using web technology.
The idea of major applications on your desktop, that you use every day, being entirely web-based was pretty far-fetched a few years ago — many people were skeptical that the web could ever supercede desktop apps in both performance, or usability.
Now, in 2017, many web-based desktop apps are fantastic — and we’re using them daily, often without even knowing. Last week, I realized that most of the applications I use every day are web-based, with the exception of a handful of heavier tools like PhotoShop and Audition.
Realized the majority of the apps I use every day are Electron. The web is swallowing the desktop. pic.twitter.com/t27L5U9roo
— Owen ⚡️ (@ow) March 15, 2017
Electron, which was built originally as a way for GitHub to release its Atom code editor across platforms, only hit the world in 2015 for the first time, but it’s already quickly changing the types of apps we use daily.
Every type of app you use can eventually become an Electron app, and it’s happening fast: I’ve converted to Nylas for email, Slack for chat, Hyper for my terminal, Visual Studio Code for development and a whole lot more. Even outside of Electron, the web is creeping in everywhere: Spotify’s desktop app is built with JavaScript too.
The reason for this rapid change is simply that an Electron app is easier to maintain and develop, allows you to target multiple platforms and lets your team use modern build pipelines to write once and truly run everywhere. As a result, they tend to be more actively maintained, and see more updates than the competition.
“Look i want native apps to not suck but apple doesn’t give a shit, ms barely gives a shit, and app devs absolutely do not give a shit”
A lot of people highlight that Electron apps tend to use more memory than others, but that claim tends to be overblown, or just simply out-dated. Nylas’ desktop email app uses just 80MB of Memory, while Slack only uses 166MB — developers might loudly complain that’s too much, but given modern machines tend to have more than 8GB of RAM onboard, what does it matter?
Companies like Slack are addressing that head-on. A post this month said that the company is already addressing memory concerns (most of which happen to outlying users that are signed into many teams) and that it’s entirely resolvable — it just takes smart decisions.
Another popular complaint is that Electron-based apps don’t look and feel as good as their native counterparts. That might be true for some, but Nylas Mail looks just as good as Apple’s own default mail client, and Slack blends just like everything else.
The thing is, most users can’t even tell they’re using a “web app” anymore. In Electron’s early days, it’s true that they tended to be slower, or stick out like a sore thumb, but now I generally prefer them for how well they feel like a real native app.
Why should a user even give a shit what’s underneath, as long as they can get their work done? And best of all, updates keep getting delivered, and they basically have no idea.
Spotify Web Player
There are a lot of Electron haters out there, and any time you bring it up on Twitter you’re sure to be eaten alive, but the justifications for not using Electron are dated and just plain wrong: the reality is that people are writing useful software with Electron and actually ship shit.
App that replaces youtube spotify and facetime app. Companion For Spotify is designed to accompany the Spotify streaming music service. It automates several workflows for you. Companion For Spotify will find albums that were added by Artists that you follow (and their related artists) since your last visit. It can also find if there were any updates to the playlists that you follow. In both cases, Companion For Spotify will import the updated. We can also replace many of the centralized applications on the current Internet, such as YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, and others with decentralized, open source alternatives. We will have to start by decentralizing the current Internet, and then we can create a new Internet to replace it.
“Cue loads of native devs saying “web apps suck” and millions of real users happily not giving a fuck what they’re written in.”
Best of all, many of these Electron-based apps have actually built a business model! Nylas, which is 100% Electron, is growing an entire platform despite only having an Electron app, which might have been a sin in the past — and people are paying for it!
Nylas’ founder, Michael Grinich says the company took a huge, risky bet on choosing Electron a few years ago — I’m sure people thought they were crazy — but that it’s paying off.
Spotify Desktop App Electron Configuration
The biggest benefit of Electron, for me, has been proven through my switch to Windows. The majority of the apps I use and love every day exist on both platforms thanks to the technology, and operate exactly the same all while blending in with the operating system.
Apps are winning! No wait! The browser is winning! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/lpazY5EBXG
— Koen Bok (@koenbok) January 3, 2017
Electron Desktop App
The best part about this transition is end-users basically haven’t noticed. Millions of people are happily using Slack every day, and it helps them get their job done.
An example of how a business model can be disrupted by Electron is already underway. Sketch’s design tool that hundreds of thousands of designers use famously only works on a Mac — there are hundreds of people looking for alternatives on Google, and as far as anyone can tell, it’s an intentional omission:
“Sketch relies on a lot of technology that is exclusive to OS X and the fact that no other OS provide a clear business model for software development, we’re not considering supporting it.”
Great, but there are thousands of Windows designers out there too… so what do they use? Is there not a paid market for them to use too?
Well, as it turns out, Figma, a new entrant in the market that offers a web-based offering also has an Electron app, and it can directly import Sketch files too.
Is Spotify An Electron App
In my mind, it’s only a matter of time before the tool that works everywhere eventually beats out the tool that’s restricted to slow releases on a single platform — oh, and Figma literally ships a platform update every other week.
Spotify Desktop App Electron
It’s still early days, but Electron is eating the desktop alive. There’s no way to stop it, and developers planning a native app should seriously ask themselves: should I learn to write HTML instead, and use Electron so I can target users on any platform?
Spotify Desktop Player
It’s clear that the answer is yes, and that the true native app is a dying breed.