About

The code in this repository uses Ansible to configure spotifyd, a lightweight, open-source Spotify client which runs as a UNIX daemon, and supports the Spotify Connect protocol.

I run this setup on a headless Raspberry Pi, so that I can control Spotify from my phone (and other devices on my home network), and have it play through my (somewhat outdated) Marantz M-CR603 amplifier.

Although many, if not most modern amplifiers, have built-in streaming functionality, the M-CR603 doesn't! Despite this, it is still a very capable and performant amplifier. Fortunately, the combination of Spotifyd and a Raspberry Pi means I can bring streaming to this outdated hardware.

Audio output

Although it is possible to use the Pi's in-built 3.5mm headphone jack to output audio, the jack's quality is known to be somewhat lacking. Instead, I bought a HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro, and carry audio from that board to my amplifier via optical output (TOSLINK).

How to use this code

If you'd like to use this code to configure and install Spotifyd on your own Raspberry Pi device, you can do so by first cloning this repo (forking it first, if you'd like to keep any changes you make to the config).

Note that to use Spotifyd, you'll need a premium Spotify account!

Usernames and passwords

Note that, at the time of writing, in the latest release of Spotifyd (v0.3.5), support for "zerconf" authentication has been added, which means it is possible to use Spotifyd without specifying your username or password at all! However, here I still use the username and password config options, as this approach will still work with earlier release of Spotifyd.

Spotifyd will need to authenticate against your Spotify account to work. As such, you'll need to provide Spotifyd your username and password. In this project, I've used Ansible vault to encrypt and store these credentials, and inject them in plaintext into the Spotifyd config file at runtime.

Of course, storing credentials in plaintext is only advisable if you're running Spotifyd on your own Raspberry Pi, with restricted access.

My Raspberry Pi is not accessible via the public internet, and is only accessible over SSH in my home network. Under these circumstances, I'm happy storing these credentials in plaintext.

Spotifyd does support storing your Spotify credentials in your OS's keyring (see the use-keyring config option), but the Ansible solution in this project doesn't support it.

To create an Ansible vault to encrypt and store your Spotify username and password, begin by creating a password for your Ansible vault, and storing it in the .vault_pass file. You could create a random password for your vault with:

tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 24 > .vault_pass

.vault_pass has been added to this project's .gitignore to prevent it from accidentally ending up in git.

Now you have a vault password, you can create a new vault with

# Ensure there is no existing Ansible vault
rm group_vars/local

# Create a new Ansible vault
ansible-vault create group_vars/local

In the editor which appears, add your username and password as the following variables:

ansible_vault_spotify_user: <your-username-here>
ansible_vault_spotify_password: <your-password-here>

Installing and configuring

By default, this project is configured to install the latest available version of Spotifyd. However, it is also possible to configure Ansible to install any other valid release by editing the variable spotifyd_version in the hosts file.

You can then install and configure Spotifyd by running setup.sh (you may need to run chmod +x setup.sh first).