With the built-in Spotify support I had trouble with sources (ie streams/zones) not showing in Spotify Connect.
With LMS the Spotify Connect part works well, but Spotify playback is not very good. It can play songs, but stops playing randomly. Sometimes in the middle of a song, sometimes at the end it never moves to the next song.
Unofficial Spotify support just isn’t very good. I expect the stopping problem stems from both Spotify and LMS expecting to be in control playback. Also it’s odd that the Spotify interface doesn’t sync with LMS playback, the time starts counting up before LMS starts playing, Spotify shows the next song as playing before LMS finishes the last one.
Is there any chance for official Spotify support? That’s what I really want, even if it was a paid add on.
As far as official support, Spotify seems to think we’re small fries. They’ve ignored any time we’ve requested API keys for official support; We’ve applied again recently and will happily let you know if we get there.
Here’s where we stand for now:
spotifyd, the library we’ve used to implement Spotify Connect support, has been screwed over by Spotify updating their API. We’re currently shopping around for other implementations and seeing what we can implement ourselves, currently librespot has a PR to their own repo that allegedly solves this issue so we’re watching their development closely so we can potentially implement them in the next update.
We will keep you all posted on our progress in this regard, Spotify is our most popular stream and so fixing it is our highest priority at this moment, though doing so may take time.
That’s a bummer that Spotify doesn’t make things more open. Supporting it unofficially would have to work very well to be feasible. Spotify has many minor annoyances and they don’t improve their UI in a long time. It might be reasonable for some Spotify users to change to another service.
Tidal seems like a reasonable alternative, though I haven’t tried it. Maybe Tidal support is easier for AmpliPro to support.
I also came across Roon. It might be interesting to get that to run on AmpliPro. It’s a player, so akin to LMS, IIUC. Roon supports Tidal.
While you await our fix for Spotify streams, you can:
Stream via Airplay (if you’ve got an Airplay-enabled device).
Stream Spotify from your phone using Bluetooth (with a third party Bluetooth USB adapter added to your unit)
Attempt to use the LMS integration of Spotify (something that is outlined in this blog post)
If you’ve got smart home devices that are able to take a Spotify Connect stream you could potentially also use an aux cord to port those directly into AmpliPro, just make sure you do not power said device through any of the onboard USBs or you could find yourself inducing some white noise.
I still seem to be having issues connecting and staying connected to the spotify stream. I haven’t seen any recent movement on this topic so maybe it’s generally considered to be solved. Is there any data I can provide from my setup that might help figure something out? The work arounds suggested don’t work very well for me. I don’t have any airplay devices, I don’t currently have a bluetooth adapter installed on my AmpliPi and I also don’t currently have a bluetooth source regularly near the amplipi. I tried the LMS option which wasn’t terrible but also wasn’t great.
I believe yours is the first Spotify issue we’ve heard since we moved to a new implementation during our 0.4.5 update, can you go to your Settings → About page and verify that your system is up to date?
Thank you for confirming. Can you also go to Settings → Streams → {the name of your Spotify stream} and then hit “Restart Stream”? This will help verify that the stream itself isn’t in a weird state. We’re going to make sure to run multiple instances of Spotify internally as well to verify that 0.4.6 hasn’t somehow harmed our implementation.
If your issues persist, would you also mind grabbing logs? You can do this by going to Settings → About → Logs (a link at the bottom of the list) and then either saving them as a file or copy+pasting them to send in an email to us at support@micro-nova.com
I think I have an additional detail that might lead to an answer. During the period where things were very unstable with the spotify connection, spotify came out with the ‘DJ’ feature. I’ve been using that extensively. For some reason that doesn’t work with some speakers. In most cases, it just means that you don’t get the DJ voice announcements … which is fine by me. In the case of the amplipi, it seems to fail to connect.
I don’t understand what it could be about the DJ feature that would only work with some output devices, but here we are.
With DJ mode, playback is working normally but we aren’t hearing any of the AI commentary, this likely requires using the official Spotify binary. We will continue testing this and report any additional problems we have. At the moment it is looking like DJ mode is unrelated to your current problems.
Hmnmn … this is odd. I didn’t realize you had responded and was just coming back to provide an update. Things are working for me 100% of the time when I’m NOT using the DJ … and failing 100% of the time when I try playing hte DJ channel through amplipi. I exclusively use the DJ mode in all other enviroments. It’s only in my office that I use the ampilipi and for the moment have just been playing other channels and it’s been working fine.
It may be helpful to note that I am able to reproduce both cases 100% of the time, so if any logs would be useful, or access to my network/devices I’m happy to help in any way I can. Perhaps there is another variabkle that I’m not thinking of that when combined with the DJ/non-DJ modes is resulting in the behavior I’m seeing? Unsure what that would be but it certainly could be a thing.
Hmm. This is a beta feature, so we may just be testing 2 slightly different version of Spotify’s DJ mode. I tested this using the Spotify for Android app. What type of device are you controlling this with? Android, IOS, PC?
I’m getting the same results when controlling via Android (Pixel 9 Pro XL) or Windows Spotify client. I’m happy to provide any diagnostic data I can. Just let me know what steps to take to gather it?
I retested this in the office today and was unable to get DJ Mode working, even after updating to the latest version our underlying Spotify client, go-librespot 0.2.0. I don’t understand why it worked before, but we are now able to fully reproduce this. I’ll check with go-librespot and see if they have any idea how to support this.
EDIT:: I added an issue to keep track of this here