spotify-player

• spotify-player by GitHub/User/aome510 aka Person/Thang Pham

  • A Spotify player in the terminal with full feature parity
    

  • GitHub/Star count: 6,888 as of 2026-06-27 Sat

  • Technical Aspects

    • Built with Rust
      • uses RustAudio/rodio as its backend. Other backends include
        • alsa-backend
        • pulseaudio-backend
        • rodio-backend
        • portaudio-backend
        • jackaudio-backend
        • rodiojack-backend
        • sdl-backend
        • gstreamer-backend
    • Uses librespot crates for Spotify playback, metadata, OAuth login, and Spotify Connect.
    • Uses rspotify for Spotify Web API calls. The Spotify Web API is Spotify's HTTP-based application programming interface for metadata and account actions.
    • Uses Ratatui for terminal layout and rendering, with crossterm for terminal input, screen control, and styling.
    • Uses reqwest, tokio, and rustls for network and asynchronous work.
    • Uses souvlaki and winit for optional media-key integration.
    • Uses image and viuer for optional album-cover rendering in terminals.
    • Uses notify-rust for optional desktop notifications.
    • Uses rustfft for optional audio visualization when direct streaming is enabled.

  • Features

    • configurable
    • To enable fuzzy search, build with the fzf feature (disabled by default).

      • To enable fuzzy search, build with the  fzf feature (disabled by default).
        

    • remote control with Spotify Connect.
    • streaming songs directly from the terminal.
    • audio visualization.
    • synced lyrics.
    • cross-platform media control.
    • image rendering.
    • desktop notification.
    • running the application as a daemon
    • CLI commands
      • scripting

        • read -p "Search spotify: " query
          spotify_player playback start track --id $(spotify_player search "$query" | jq '.tracks.[0].id' | xargs)

  • Examples

    • A demo of spotify_player v0.5.0-pre-release
    • see also asciicast
    • Checkout examples/README.md for more examples.

  • Supply Chain Notes

    • Cargo.lock shows about 778 locked package entries, 700 unique Rust/crate names, 47 direct dependencies, and an approximate longest dependency chain of 33 edges.
    • This is the largest dependency tree of the three Spotify terminal clients in this comparison. It is slightly deeper than ncspot and much larger than spotify-tui.
    • The larger tree comes from feature breadth: direct Spotify streaming through librespot, multiple audio backends, terminal rendering, image display, desktop notifications, media-key integration, OAuth login, and audio visualization.
    • The project uses a modern core stack: tokio 1.50, clap 4.6, ratatui 0.30, crossterm 0.29, rspotify 0.15, reqwest 0.13, and rustls 0.23.
    • The main review areas are audio output backends, TLS networking, OAuth token handling, terminal rendering, image decoding, notifications, media-key integration, and daemon mode.
    • Optional Cargo features matter here. A smaller build can avoid features such as image, notify, daemon, fzf, and non-default audio backends when those are not needed.