Psst

Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust. Very early in development, lacking in features, stability, and general user experience. It is being tested only on Mac so far, but aims for full Windows and Linux support. Contributions welcome!

Pre-built binaries

GitHub Actions automatically runs when new commits are pushed to master. To download prebuilt binaries for x86_64 macOS, Windows or Ubuntu, go to the newest successfully built action.

Linux

Our user-interface library, Druid, has two possible backends to choose from on Linux: GTK and pure X11, with Wayland backend in the works. The default linux backend is GTK. Before building on Linux, make sure the required dependencies are installed.

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libgtk-3-dev libcairo2-dev

RHEL/Fedora:

sudo dnf install openssl-devel gtk3-devel cairo-devel

Building

On all platforms, the latest Rust stable (at least 1.54.0) is neeed.

Development build:

git submodule update --recursive --init
cargo build

Release build:

git submodule update --recursive --init
cargo build --release

Running and configuration

cd psst-gui
cargo run
# Use cargo run --release for the release build.

Roadmap

• Vorbis track playback
• Browsing saved albums and tracks
• Save / unsave albums and tracks
• Browsing followed playlists
• Search for artist, albums, and tracks
• Resilience to network errors (automatically retry timed-out requests)
• Managing playlists
  • Follow / unfollow
  • Add / remove track
  • Reorder tracks
  • Rename playlist
• Playback queue
• Audio volume control
• Audio loudness normalization
• React to audio output device events
  • Pause after disconnecting headphones
  • Transfer playback after connecting headphones
• Better caching
  • Cache as much as possibly of WebAPI responses
  • Visualize cache utilization
    • Total cache usage in the config dialog
    • Show time origin of cached data, allow to refresh
• Media keys control
• Open Spotify links
• Trivia on the artist page, Wikipedia links
• Genre playlists and "For You" content
• Downloading encrypted tracks
• Reporting played tracks to Spotify servers
• OS-specific application bundles
• Podcast support
• UI
  • Rethink current design, consider a two-pane layout
    • Left pane for browsing
    • Right pane for current playback
  • Dark theme
  • Detect light/dark OS theme
  • Icon
  • Robust error states, ideally with retry button
  • Correct playback highlight
    • Highlight now-playing track only in the correct album / playlist
    • Keep highlighted track in viewport
  • Paging or virtualized lists for albums and tracks
  • Grid for albums and artists
  • Robust active/inactive menu visualization
  • Save last route, volume, playback state

Development

Contributions are very welcome! Project structure:

• /psst-cli - Example CLI that plays a track. Credentials need to be configured in the code.
• /psst-core - Core library, takes care of Spotify TCP session, audio file retrieval, decoding, audio output, playback queue, etc.
• /psst-gui - GUI application built with Druid
• /psst-protocol - Internal Protobuf definitions used for Spotify communication.

Thanks

This project would not exist without:

• Big thank you to librespot, the Open Source Spotify client library for Rust. Most of psst-core is directly inspired by the ideas and code of librespot, although with a few differences:
  • Spotify Connect (remote control) is not supported yet.
  • We're completely synchronous, without tokio or other async runtime. I just don't understand the async jungle enough to port librespot from pre-async/await tokio-0.1 code to anything both stable and modern.
  • We're using HTTPS-based CDN audio file retrieval, similar to the official Web client or librespot-java, instead of the older, channel-based approach in librespot.
• druid native GUI library for Rust.
• aspotify asynchronous client library for the Spotify Web API.
• ncspot cross-platform ncurses Spotify client written in Rust, using librespot.