But it's not a Spotify client, is it?
IIRC it uses Spotify APIs to generate playlists, but that's all.
Actual music gets streamed from YouTube.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
186 points (89.4% liked)
Open Source
30314 readers
2146 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Thanks. I was interested how it was getting access to Spotify music library and suggestion algorithms but turns out it just isn't.
Wonder why is trying to pretend to be Spotify when it could just market itself as a YouTube music interface.
I don't know why, but personally it really rubs me the wrong way.
It's not really "false advertising", since it's not a paid app, but still...
Real open source alternatives exist, but they require Spotify Premium to actually stream music legally straight from Spotify.
What are those open source alternatives you mention?
Are those Spotify alternative clients just for a better ux?
Yeah, but I don't really use them, so not the best person to ask. :)
I don't really see any false advertising. It is explicitly described as exactly what it is.
"An open source, cross-platform Spotify client compatible across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API and YouTube, Piped.video or JioSaavn as an audio source, eliminating the need for Spotify Premium"
I guess it lacks the suggestion algo but that's the privacy compromise I guess.
No, it's not.
It says it's a "Spotify client". It simply isn't.
Read the next few words
Because people like me want all my spotify playlists regardless of where they are getting streamed.
Yeah, I tried it and the quality wasn't great
Yup, tried it for a week straight now on both desktop and android, and although a great application, it isn't quite ready for me to transfer to it fully at least. But defo keeping a close eye on the development 😊
Nice to have a tin ear sometimes
Yeah. It's both kind of useless if you already have spotify and very misleading.
Read the description imo
I've been using this for a little while now on Android. I believe it works by using Spotify track data and your account there to then use YouTube's audio to feed your the music you ask for. It's seamlessly done. So far it's meeting all my streaming music needs, even if it is sometimes a little uneven in performance.
Man I love open-source for such things. But wait does Spotify really have an API? I didn't know that
Yes, they do! You can even look up additional information about songs like the bpm, gebre, etc., I am tempted to do some project with it.
Why not using musicbrainz for that?
I use it to switch playback between my phone and computer using a keyboard shortcut.
Very useful actually.
Doesn't work without a Spotify account. No playlist downloads. Eats ram on my laptop like crazy. But it looks nice.
Aside of the cross-platform why this one and not Innertune?
Ytm has TERRIBLE recommendations
Does innertune support Spotify playlists etc?
Given the revelation that it hooks into Spotify to get playlists etc, I really wish there wasn't that strong of a dependency on Spotify, and that I could just search for songs and start playing.
I was hoping for more YouTube music player, and less Spotify.
I have Spotify Premium which I pay for, and the desktop client is very fast and snappy to play songs. SpotTube is OK, but it isn't as snappy as Spotify. For something that is free, that is absolutely fine, but the fact it requires Spotify for playlist etc...
I definitely get why. Spotify does playlist generation like no other, and it is the biggest platform by far. But I kind of wish I had a version that wasn't all about the algorithms.
Also, the way you "login" to Spotify on the desktop is incredibly user un-friendly at best, and incredibly brittle at worst. Copying and pasting a cookie that Spotify uses shouldn't be used as a way to login to any service, like, at all. And if Spotify are smart, they'll break this functionality within a month or so using something like Fingerprint.js to identify which device the session belongs to, thus invalidating the session.
Youtube Music alt players are all over the place. Blackhole, ViMusic, Innertune, Revanced to name a few
I had no idea! Thanks for the list, I'll check them out!
EDIT: It seems like a lot of these are Android apps. I was looking for desktop apps if I was being honest. That, and I have an iPhone.
Unfortunately there’s currently no way to prevent it from automatically loading on your Mac ;-)
I’m absolutely going to give this a try. Thanks for posting!
Unfortunately Spotube doesn't play podcasts
I am not sure how legal this is, since Spotify exposes the API only for premium customers. But have a look at this project that is written in Rust and uses the aforementioned API to stream
I don't even think any apps that use the API are allowed to use "Spot" in their name.
It cannot begin with “Spot” or be similar to “Spotify” in sound or spelling.
I've seen some some other projects that scrape Spotify instead to get their curated playlists, then use Piped & Invidious instances to identify and stream the track file from YouTube
I like it a lot, but for some reason almost all players on Android, that make use of YT have this issue, it stops playing track or two randomly. And then I have to manually put it to the next song or try to launch that particular track several times. Harmony Music and Blackhole do not have this issue. Recomendations aren't there though. I have less issues on Linux version.