Fastpotify

Spotify, native and fast. Fastpotify is a Spotify client written in Rust with egui. It plays music through librespot. It typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM, while Spotify's desktop app often uses 600 MB to over 1 GB. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, starts in well under a second, and has no browser engine.

Playback needs Spotify Premium. Free accounts can browse and search, but cannot play music through Fastpotify on this computer or another device.

See fastpotify.rocks for installation, setup, everyday use, and connection details.

• Plays music on this computer. Fastpotify appears as a Spotify Connect device. Select it from your phone or play music in the app. Playback is gapless and supports up to 320 kbps, with optional volume normalisation and an on-disk audio cache.

• Controls other devices. Move playback to a speaker, a phone, or another computer from the device picker, and keep controlling it: play, pause, skip, seek, shuffle, repeat, volume.

• Finds speakers on your network. Fastpotify finds librespot, spotifyd, and supported hardware receivers over mDNS. Once connected, they appear as Spotify Connect devices.

• Library. Browse playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, and saved episodes. Spotify playlist folders appear in the sidebar and can be folded closed. Filter, pin, and reorder sidebar items.

• Search across songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes, with a top result and per-type views.

• Home with Made for you, Recently played, your top artists and songs, and recommendations.

• Artist pages with popular songs, a filterable discography, and related artists. Album, playlist, and podcast pages support playback from any row.

• Edit your playlists. Create, rename, describe, reorder, and delete them. Add songs from a row menu or drag them to a playlist in the sidebar.

• Queue as a side panel or a page; add anything to it from a row menu.

• Resumes the last session. On startup, the last song is paused where it stopped. Play resumes it, and the other playback controls work before it starts.

• Album-art colour. Pages and the player bar take a tint from the cover of what you are looking at or listening to. Turn it off in Settings.

• Light and dark, or follow the system.

• Winamp mini player. Ctrl+M opens a small player for classic .wsz skins, drawn at 1x to 4x scale. It includes a spectrum analyser, playlist, and equalizer. Drop a skin from the Winamp Skin Museum on either window to add it.

  

• Equalizer. Winamp's ten bands and presets over the music played on this computer, in Settings and in the skin.

• MilkDrop. The visualiser, powered by projectM, runs in its own window and process. It supports fullscreen and .milk presets.

• Keyboard-first. Every common action has a shortcut (Ctrl+/ or ? lists them).

• Keeps playing when you close the window. Fastpotify stays in the system tray. Use the tray icon or media controls to reopen it, and quit from the tray menu or with Ctrl+Q. You can make the close button quit in Settings. On macOS, the Dock icon also reopens the window.

• Visible network activity. Pages show a spinner while loading. The top bar also shows slow or rate-limited Spotify requests.

• One instance. Launching it again brings the existing window forward instead of starting a second copy, on every platform.

• Desktop integration. MPRIS on Linux, so media keys, the shell, and playerctl see Fastpotify like any other player. On macOS and Windows, fastpotify next and its siblings drive the running app from a terminal, a launcher, or a hotkey.

On Arch Linux, Fastpotify is in the AUR:

yay -S fastpotify-bin      # the released build, ready made
yay -S fastpotify          # the release, built from source
yay -S fastpotify-git      # built from the latest commit

On macOS, with Homebrew:

brew install --cask crmne/tap/fastpotify

Everywhere else, build the single binary with Rust 1.95 or newer:

cargo install --path .

MilkDrop uses libprojectM, which is built from source. This needs CMake, a C++ compiler, and libclang. To build without MilkDrop or those tools, run cargo install --path . --no-default-features. On Linux, you also need the development packages for ALSA, PulseAudio or PipeWire, and the windowing libraries. On Arch:

sudo pacman -S --needed alsa-lib libpulse libxkbcommon wayland cmake clang

and on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev \
  cmake clang libclang-dev

On Windows, libprojectM is built with Visual Studio 2022, CMake, LLVM, and vcpkg (vcpkg install glew:x64-windows-static-md, with VCPKG_INSTALLATION_ROOT pointing at the vcpkg folder).

With Nix, nix develop provides all of it, along with the exact toolchain rust-toolchain.toml pins.

Fastpotify uses system fonts for scripts not covered by its interface font, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, and Indic scripts. macOS and Windows include common fonts. On Linux, install noto-fonts and noto-fonts-cjk (Arch) or fonts-noto and fonts-noto-cjk (Debian or Ubuntu) if titles appear as empty boxes.

A desktop entry is provided in packaging/applications/fastpotify.desktop.

Press Sign in with Spotify. Your browser opens Spotify's consent page (Authorization Code with PKCE), so Fastpotify never sees your password. The app stores a refresh token in the platform's state directory (~/.local/state/fastpotify on Linux). You usually sign in once per machine.

Playing music on this computer needs a second, one-time browser approval. Spotify handles streaming separately from library access. Start it from the device menu (Set up playback here) or Settings. It needs Spotify Premium, and librespot stores a reusable credential for later sessions.

The Web API uses a shared app by default. You can add a personal Spotify Development Mode app in Settings → Account for a separate quota. Fastpotify still uses the shared app for requests that personal apps do not support.

We are not aware of a Spotify account being suspended for using Fastpotify or another librespot player with Premium. Sign-in happens on Spotify's own pages, audio uses the quality included with Premium, DRM stays intact, and Fastpotify does not rip tracks or block ads.

Reported suspensions usually involve modded apps that remove ads from free accounts, track ripping, or stream manipulation. Fastpotify does none of those things, and CONTRIBUTING.md prohibits them.

On macOS, Cmd replaces Ctrl.

On Linux, Fastpotify is an MPRIS player, so playerctl --player=fastpotify play-pause already works.

macOS and Windows have no such bus, so the same verbs are subcommands. They talk to the instance already running and print nothing on success:

fastpotify play-pause          fastpotify volume 40
fastpotify play                fastpotify volume-up [percent]
fastpotify pause               fastpotify volume-down [percent]
fastpotify next                fastpotify mute
fastpotify previous            fastpotify shuffle [on|off]
fastpotify seek 15             fastpotify repeat [off|context|track]
fastpotify seek -- -15         fastpotify like
fastpotify seek-to 90          fastpotify play-uri spotify:playlist:37i9…
fastpotify show                fastpotify transfer <device-id>
fastpotify now-playing [--raw] fastpotify devices [--raw]

shuffle and repeat toggle when used without an argument. Pass a state to set it directly. like adds or removes the playing track from your library.

now-playing prints one readable line. --raw prints tab-separated fields: state, title, artists, album, position_ms, duration_ms, volume, shuffle, repeat, art_url, saved, and device. saved is yes, no, or unknown while loading. New fields are appended to keep older scripts working.

devices lists Spotify Connect devices with the ID first and the active one marked with *. --raw prints JSON. The command refreshes the device list, so the first call after startup may be empty. Run it again if needed.

A verb exits non-zero when Fastpotify is not running.

Launchers such as Raycast or Alfred can use these commands. The Stream Deck plugin uses the same interface.

Settings live in one readable JSON file (~/.config/fastpotify/settings.json on Linux). They include the Connect device name, bitrate, normalisation, autoplay, gapless playback, the audio backend (PulseAudio/PipeWire or ALSA on Linux), audio cache size, theme, sidebar state, whether pages take colour from artwork, and the mini player's skin and size. Playback settings apply when you press Apply and restart playback.

Caches (audio, artwork) live under the cache directory and can be deleted at any time without signing you out.

• src/player.rs: librespot playback, mixing, and Spotify Connect state.
• src/api/: shared and personal Web API sessions, routing, concurrency, and rate limits.
• src/backend.rs: the tokio runtime and channels used by the interface.
• src/images.rs: album art loading, caching, and accent-colour extraction.
• src/app.rs, src/model.rs, src/ui/: state, navigation, and views.
• src/mpris.rs: Linux media controls.

Fastpotify pins its Rust toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml; cargo test covers the API models, dual-session routing, PKCE, the player state machine, and a headless render of every page, panel, and dialog.

To look at the interface without a Spotify account, build with the demo feature and start it with sample data:

cargo run --features demo -- --demo --demo-page playlist:pl1 --demo-show queue

Demo mode never writes settings. --demo-shot <PATH> writes the window to a PNG and exits, which is how the screenshot above is made.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening an issue or pull request. It covers project scope and required checks.

Fastpotify uses librespot, egui, the Inter typeface (OFL), and Lucide icons (ISC).

Fastpotify is an independent project and is not affiliated with Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

Licensed under the MIT License.