I listen to music a lot when I’m on the computer. When I’m not playing the fip radio with its incredible playlist, I listen to music or some podcasts on Spotify.
Two years ago, I started a very small project to be able to display the currently playing song in my window manager’s taskbar. I wrote a tool in rust using rspotify, a Spotify Web API SDK implemented in Rust.
The tool was working just fine but from the start I wanted it to do a bit more: Play or Pause the playback, or Skip to the previous or next song in the queue. I added such commands to have bound to the media keys of my keyboard. That way, I don’t have to go the application and can stay focus on what I’m doing.
I wrote all this in a tool called spotifyctl. You can find more about it on the following links:
The installation itself is a bit complex since one has to register an application to spotify to get some application tokens, then add you own spotify user to it, and then let your own spotify user agree for API access by this application.
Once it’s done, the tokens are read by the application through environment variables and a token is saved and refreshed in your configuration directory (~/.config/.spotifyctl.token).
I’ve added Dependabot and a small CI to help me keep it up-to-date.
I do not plan any new feature at the moment, but who knows!