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librespot-org
librespot
Rust2018–2026
librespot-org / librespot

librespot

Open Source Spotify client library

33Distinct people
38Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Open Source Spotify client library

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:24:48 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year38 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-10-19 19:54:21 UTC to 2026-09-01 20:55:20 UTC.

0510152018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Current maintainers are listed on GitHub. librespot librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify's service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver. It is an alternative to the official and now deprecated closed-source libspotify. Additionally, it will provide extra features which are not available in the official library. Note: librespot only works with Spotify Premium. This will remain the case. We will not support any features to make librespot compatible with free accounts, such as limited skips and adverts. Quick start We're available on crates.io as the librespot package. Simply run cargo install librespot to install librespot on your system. Check the wiki for more info and possible usage options. After installation, you can run librespot from the CLI using a command such as librespot -n "Librespot Speaker" -b 160 to create a speaker called Librespot Speaker serving 160 kbps audio. This fork As the origin by plietar is no longer actively maintained, this organisation and repository have been set up so that the project may be maintained and upgraded in the future. Documentation Documentation is currently a work in progress, contributions are welcome! There is some brief documentation on how the protocol works in the docs folder. COMPILING.md contains detailed instructions on setting up a development environment, and compiling librespot. More general usage and compilation information is available on the wiki. CONTRIBUTING.md also contains our contributing guidelines. If you wish to learn more about how librespot works overall, the best way is to simply read the code, and ask any questions you have in our Gitter Room. Issues & Discussions We have recently started using Github discussions for general questions and feature requests, as they are a more natural medium for such cases, and allow for upvoting to prioritize feature development. Check them out here. Bugs and issues with the underlying library should still be reported as issues. If you run into a bug when using librespot, please search the existing issues before opening a new one. Chances are, we've encountered it before, and have provided a resolution. If not, please open a new one, and where possible, include the backtrace librespot generates on crashing, along with anything we can use to reproduce the issue, e.g. the Spotify URI of the song that caused the crash. Building A quick walkthrough of the build process is outlined below, while a detailed compilation guide can be found here. Additional Dependencies We recently switched to using Rodio for audio playback by default, hence for macOS and Windows, you should just be able to clone and build librespot (with the command below). For Linux, you will need to run the additional commands below, depending on your distro. On Debian/Ubuntu, the following command will install these dependencies: sudo apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev On Fedora systems, the following command will install these dependencies: sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel make gcc librespot currently offers the following selection of audio backends: Rodio (default) ALSA GStreamer PortAudio PulseAudio JACK JACK over Rodio SDL Pipe Subprocess Please check COMPILING.md for detailed information on TLS, audio, and discovery backend dependencies, or the Compiling entry on the wiki for additional backend specific dependencies. Once you've installed the dependencies and cloned this repository you can build librespot with the default features using Cargo. cargo build --release By default, this builds with native-tls (system TLS), rodio audio backend, and libmdns discovery. See COMPILING.md for information on selecting different TLS, audio, and discovery backends. Packages librespot is also available via official package system on various operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD. Repology offers a good overview. Usage A sample program implementing a headless Spotify Connect receiver is provided. Once you've built librespot, run it using : target/release/librespot --name DEVICENAME The above is a minimal example. Here is a more fully fledged one: target/release/librespot -n "Librespot" -b 320 -c ./cache --enable-volume-normalisation --initial-volume 75 --device-type avr The above command will create a receiver named Librespot, with bitrate set to 320 kbps, initial volume at 75%, with volume normalisation enabled, and the device displayed in the app as an Audio/Video Receiver. A folder named cache will be created/used in the current directory, and be used to cache audio data and credentials. A full list of runtime options is available here. Please Note: When using the cache feature, an authentication blob is stored for your account in the cache directory. For security purposes, we recommend that you set directory permissions on the cache directory to 700. Contact Come and hang out on gitter if you need help or want to offer some: https://gitter.im/librespot-org/spotify-connect-resources Disclaimer Using this code to connect to Spotify's API is probably forbidden by them. Use at your own risk. License Everything in this repository is licensed under the MIT license. Related Projects This is a non exhaustive list of projects that either use or have modified librespot. If you'd like to include yours, submit a PR. librespot-golang - A golang port of librespot. plugin.audio.spotify - A Kodi plugin for Spotify. raspotify - A Spotify Connect client that mostly Just Works™ Spotifyd - A stripped down librespot UNIX daemon. rpi-audio-receiver - easy Raspbian install scripts for Spotifyd, Bluetooth, Shairport and other audio receivers Spotcontrol - A golang implementation of a Spotify Connect controller. No Playback functionality. librespot-java - A Java port of librespot. ncspot - Cross-platform ncurses Spotify client. ansible-role-librespot - Ansible role that will build, install and configure Librespot. Spot - Gtk/Ru
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

2 sources
As I already posted to the growing thread of discontent at https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Chan... this is Spotify's usual deprecation strategy and they've done this before to their APIs. I think it's usually due to incompetence but this time that feels like only half the story. Sadly, despite their frequent self-sabotage, they still have the best API by a million miles. Anyway, anyone with a private project that doesn't mind a manual step, can grab an access token from https://open.spotify.com/get_access_token using their browser. There's also projects like librespot (and various ports) which can provide access programmatically[0] using Spotify's client ID. Oauth is useless at preventing this kind of access. [0] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/wiki/Options#acce...).
In Spotify has shut down several API endpoints

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