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.