20 ms·

Fastpotify

855 points by nreece 18d ago

bjord 18d ago
need this for android. on average, it takes genuinely about five minutes to open—I think it reindexes my entire micro sd card every time.
deleted 17d ago
[deleted]
brikym 17d ago
This looks amazing but unfortunately this project is doing free work for Spotify rather than brining competition they need. The root problem is that the content access is so gatekept. Apple music opens on it's own. Spotify is junk. YouTube music isn't much better. They've all become lazy and need a shake up.
avidruntime 17d ago
Cant seem to get milkdrop to work on the binary installed via cask on arm macOS. Everything else feels very snappy and fun
milk2540 17d ago
Please make an android port Please god I will pay
grougnax 17d ago
[dead]
pikzel 17d ago
Very promising, but works poorly. Playlists load in ~10s, app crashed after a few minutes. Vibe-coded low-quality app.
petreradu 17d ago
For me, it gets the job done, which is mainly managing the hundreds of podcast episodes I am bookmarking (and probably never listen to). Or maybe the iOS version is a bit better than the Android one.
_rwo 16d ago
took few sessions to re-slop this to OpenSubsonic (navidrome compat) backend; didn't even looked once at the code, I love and hate the future we live in thanks again for sharing!
aleksandrm 15d ago
Too bad this requires a Premium subscription, can't use this without one.
mock-possum 15d ago
hmm I wanted to like this, but for me it's noticeably slower/laggier than the official spotify app, and it's missing common ui features (you can't multi-select and delete from a playlist)
paaloeye 15d ago
The only problem with macOS Spotify, in my opinion, is audio thread isn't isolated to system performance and it can drop audio frames under load. Yes, it's Electron and it's a full browser under the hood, but given the complexity of the UI, it's a fair trade-off. I'd love to see some like headless Spotify client on macOS.
SnowingXIV 12d ago
> Local playback tops out at 320 kbps. Spotify protects its lossless streams with DRM that librespot does not support, and Fastpotify will not circumvent it. This can change if lawful support lands upstream. I was interested until this bit, and it is a shame. Not the developers issue, but man that's frustrating.
zoky 18d ago
It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?
- hdjrudni 18d ago
  It really whips the llama's ass?
ralfhn 18d ago
It takes five minutes to make a website look less obviously AI-generated.
- brendanmc6 18d ago
  It takes five seconds to scroll to the bottom and see that it's a Jekyll theme before posting a negative comment
  - danilafe 18d ago
    Surely they're referring to the llm-isms in the text?
  - minitech 18d ago
    A Jekyll theme from the same person as this project, yes.
- p-e-w 18d ago
  The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item. Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
  - xxs 18d ago
    > “not looking like it was made with injection molding” Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.
- famahar 18d ago
  If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.
wilted-iris 18d ago
Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.
- nan60 18d ago
  > radio for discovery Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
  - dylan604 18d ago
    > radio for discovery was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
    - BLKNSLVR 18d ago
      This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well. https://threedradio.com/ https://threedradio.com/ I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way. Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
fishgoesblub 18d ago
Spotify used to use Qt for its desktop client. Good times.
- occz 18d ago
  This is actually wrong, it was never QT. It was however not built with web technologies back in the day
- reddalo 18d ago
  Good times. The old Spotify client was native and fast. I miss that. The new one is heavy and clunky.
- AtNightWeCode 18d ago
  Did it really? I remember that Wimp used Adobe Air and Deezer used Flash.
Walf 18d ago
Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.
- SuperMouse 18d ago
  I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible. Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth. Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available. Alternatives?
  - Walf 18d ago
    Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone. Apple Music pays artists better, too.
  - cmehdy 18d ago
    Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly. Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
    - jorisw 18d ago
      Seriously tried Tidal. Gave up on it because of the software quality.
  - zcrar70 18d ago
    Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client. Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile. [0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-platforms/ https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...
monster_truck 18d ago
I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too I stopped sharing after that.
- figmert 18d ago
  Have you seen Spicetify[0]? It allows for this kind of stuff and seems to be a lot more stable than doing it all manually. [0] https://spicetify.app/ https://spicetify.app/
  - monster_truck 17d ago
    I have, it's good, but it is not compatible with some of the things I am doing which are quite a bit more foundational/stuctural. The pile of scripts I've accumulated do a pretty good job of resolving easy breakages, listing anything worse, and running a little lap around all of my typical interactions (from another account running in a cloud vm) to diff the network requests so I look normal to them.
rixed 18d ago
Another site tricking users willing to look at the code into starring the repo instead. How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?
- yedpodtrzitko 18d ago
  I had to read the comment a few times. Do you mean "starring" instead of "starting"?
  - rixed 18d ago
    Yes sorry, fixed. Thanks!
- earcar 18d ago
  No. The "Star" button is a simple link to the repo.
  - rixed 17d ago
    I stand corrected, and I'm glad i was wrong.
exitb 18d ago
It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.
- krekr 17d ago
  Think of something nerds will like (like this!), package malware, distribute, profit. That's the idea, right?
punarinta 18d ago
Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it. Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app https://msga.app
- rsolva 18d ago
  Just tried your slack client, it has all the features I need and it is super smooth and lightweight, thanks!
- ainiriand 18d ago
  Make MSTeams Great Again when? Amazing work btw.
  - sceptic123 18d ago
    Teams was never great to start with
  - idonotknowwhy 18d ago
    I just looked through the slop Readme file, it looks like teams is supported.
    - punarinta 18d ago
      Yes, Teams is supported, but since their API is really poor compared to Slack, the support is pretty limited.
- Shorel 18d ago
  Love it. I did the same for Postman/Bruno.
nalekberov 18d ago
Without looking at the codebase I am pretty sure it’s a vibe coded rust app, because this is what today’s most programmers understand about software.
- tetrisgm 18d ago
  and?
  - worldsavior 18d ago
    That's boring, and unmaintainable.
    - txdv 18d ago
      until someone comes up with a non vibe coded one ill be happy having at least a fast option
    - dzikimarian 18d ago
      It's working way better than original client. What does it say about Spotify devs?
- txdv 18d ago
  the commits are very fine grained and the text is unusually not AI. I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
  - ghosty141 18d ago
    I'd argue nobody writes such long commit messages this consistently. I'm VERY sure this is fully AI generated.
  - TonyStr 18d ago
    The volume of commits is quite crazy. For example, he wrote a +486/-51 commit in 20 minutes (33287cb) with quite dense rust code. That's about 25 changes per minute -- very impressive! The docs also smell of LLM output, for example describing the app as native despite using egui/wgpu. But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar
mappu 18d ago
If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.
- winrid 18d ago
  Most immediate mode does a scene graph diff so it's not that bad I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
  - IshKebab 18d ago
    Egui doesn't do that. But it's written in Rust and only updates when you interact with it so in practice it's way more efficient than I would have expected.
    - winrid 16d ago
      as a side note I absolutely hated writing UIs in egui. It is a really nice framework, but the iteration times were painful.
- mijoharas 18d ago
  I was surprised to see an immediate mode gui toolkit. They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go? Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
  - deleted 18d ago
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- deleted 18d ago
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- earcar 18d ago
  Author here. Two reasons I chose an immediate mode UI framework: 1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale. 2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it. Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.
armcat 18d ago
You had me at Winamp
- angelofthe0dd 18d ago
  Winamp was peak.
winrid 18d ago
[dead]
drxzcl 18d ago
That seems like the kind of name that's gonna earn you a C&D.
broodbucket 18d ago
Would be great if it could get included in Flathub, without it, I'd rather have an AppImage than a Flatpak file I think
TnS-hun 18d ago
It is a shame that Spotify have not made their Dear ImGui-based version available: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-604711590 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-60...
abrookewood 18d ago
I think the key call out with this is how cool egui is (the Rust GUI library it uses). Check out their website: https://www.egui.rs/ https://www.egui.rs/ The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock https://www.egui.rs/#clock Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.
- project2501 17d ago
  on Firefox and Windows, it's a disaster in addition to what other comments pointed out, on the demo ( https://www.egui.rs/#demo https://www.egui.rs/#demo ) if you have a sidebar open, there is an offset of approximately the sidebar's width (though not exactly) between the system's mouse pointer position and the web app
- WithinReason 18d ago
  The anti-aliasing is broken, it doesn't apply gamma correction
  - IshKebab 18d ago
    Did you look at it recently? Until a few months ago text was a blurry mess but it seems like they've mostly fixed it now.
- troupo 18d ago
  > Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust. So that's why text selection doesn't work.
- Fumblenuts 18d ago
  This feels like it would be an accessibility nightmare? But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
- TonyStr 18d ago
slaye 18d ago
https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ what a great feature!
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
0fflineuser 18d ago
If anyone is interested in selfhosting or wants to stop using spotify without losing the discoverabily: I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000. Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently). I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶ plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶ docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.
- mbonnet 16d ago
  you've listed eight different software doodads I'd need to accomplish what my one Spotify app that gives me access to everything I need for $15 does.
- kombine 18d ago
  I'm using a similar setup with soularr, and I just need to import my playlists from Spotify, but I'd rather not use a fork of lidarr.
  - 0fflineuser 18d ago
    Hi, Actually it's not a fork it's the docker image for the plugin branch. Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly. And it seems to have been merged so the plugin branch is not needed anymore, see: https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829 https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829 So the official image would work. edit: I just migrated and I can confirm it works. I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag. See: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-tags https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-ta...
egeozcan 18d ago
Winamp feature is great but so random, and I love how it's listed as if it's a usual feature expected from any music player. Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice! Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!
- devindotcom 18d ago
  I get around the lack of such a mode by still using winamp!
gitowiec 18d ago
When I saw the Winamp skin I had to hold to not cry
sznio 18d ago
I've been thinking recently about buying an AI-capable GPU and using it to reverse-enginner and debloat apps I use every day. It seems like a task that even a dumber AI model could do. Disassemble the app, then either cut the things I don't care about, or just implement it fresh in a correct way.
- IshKebab 18d ago
  I don't think models that run on single GPUs are capable of that yet sadly. You still need to spend ~$100k to get an actually good local LLM. Correct me if I'm wrong, local AI guys. It's really hard to get actually numbers on this stuff, but to run e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash as far as I can tell you need one of those super expensive 8 GPU machines.
  - doublerabbit 18d ago
    Aye, and those 8GPU machines are expensive. Powering 2x GPU for GLM is eye watering expense, £5k a month.
  - sznio 18d ago
    if i tasked it with "create spotify" I'd need that much. asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked. Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish. My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
    - Shorel 18d ago
      Qwen 3.8 will do it, but it will probably require 72 hours or more.
earcar 18d ago
Author here. Happy to answer any questions!
- jorisw 18d ago
  This app is a dream come true for me. As a user I'm heavily invested in Spotify but I've grown more and more irritated with their client. Especially the recommendations, which thankfully are largely absent from your client. Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page. I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
- jorisw 18d ago
  Per another comment, is it true that you trick people wanting to view your code on GitHub, into starring your repo?
  - earcar 18d ago
    No. The "Star" button on the website is a simple link to the repo.
- mijoharas 18d ago
  I was curious about the choice of an immediate mode rather than retained GUI toolkit. Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance. (Nice work btw, seems very interesting!) C.f. this comment[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099
  - earcar 18d ago
    Thanks for the link, I responded there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519723
- benjaomin 18d ago
  I takes several seconds to load the Queue, what's happening there?
GuestFAUniverse 18d ago
That name is horrible. Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.
- Traubenfuchs 18d ago
  Potify, the scientifically proven way to get toddlers potty trained, with wearables, app support and an AI coach.
merrvk 18d ago
Tried using Spotify web client on Safari the other day. Performance was absolutely terrible. For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before. I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible
skor 18d ago
if you want to discover new music, have a look at nts.live
alexyoung 18d ago
I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward. > “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.” Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it? I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?
- doublerabbit 18d ago
  I too enjoy wearing the RealPlayer skin of the 90's. Makes me look very chic.
  - bryanrasmussen 18d ago
    If the last twenty years of horror movies have taught me anything it is that maybe you can't be a real player, but you can always wear their skin!
- jcarrano 18d ago
  If it can transform into Winamp I don't care if the code is LLM generated, typed by infinite monkeys or found in some ancient scrolls. Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
  - phatfish 18d ago
    The official Spotify app has some skin in the game. Random dudes self promotion project, not so much.
    - ornornor 18d ago
dylanger 18d ago
[dead]
progbits 18d ago
What do you all use to buy music these days? I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files. Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.
- smcleod 18d ago
  Bandcamp, and I have on several occasions emailed the band directly and asked if I could purchase directly from them.
- sznio 18d ago
  I go to the weekly flea market and sometimes find something that interests me
- embedding-shape 18d ago
  Saving everything until Bandcamp Fridays for the ones on Bandcamp, otherwise pretty much Beatport or not buying it at all. Some labels I've listened to for a long time (like Liquicity) I buy the music straight from their store, figure the artist/label gets the most then.
- aorth 18d ago
  After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
- dotancohen 18d ago
  Are compact discs no longer available? I used to rip from those - every album I've ever downloaded and kept I have the CD for. Some bought before the download, many bought after. But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
  - VilleSalonen 18d ago
    [dead]
amadeuspagel 18d ago
It's hard to think of a name worse then "spotify" itself, but fast "fastpotify" may be it.
mrmincent 18d ago
I would pay reasonable money for a similar native MS Teams client. I now run teams on a separate laptop to avoid it killing my main work machine.
NoboruWataya 18d ago
Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you. The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't. Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify. As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.
Ciantic 18d ago
Very cool. I'm cloning the repo, just in case it gets taken down. I've been using EGUI, but its biggest problem is that LLMs really struggle with it. There isn't enough good examples of it. This codebase seems to have a lot of good examples, so given this as a reference, one might make a lot of progress much faster.
smcleod 18d ago
I wish someone would do this for Apple Music. Their app is dreadful!
Semkas 18d ago
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person. Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.
- yitchelle 18d ago
  As a matter of interest, would seeing a full disclosure that vibe coding was used sway your decision one way or the other?
  - Citizen_Lame 18d ago
    Due to security and future updates, yes.
  - matsemann 18d ago
    Yes, a project maintained and built over longer time has a bigger chance of staying relevant, than someone's weekend fun they will abandon once the dopamine hit of "making something" wears off.
    - slowin 18d ago
      Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.
      - fluidcruft 17d ago
        Possibly, but sunk costs fallacy often means it's possible to rely on the maintainer to stick around. I think we all know how disposable LLM-generated code can be. If I wanted to vibe code my own thing, I'd do it my way rather than fork an abandoned project. What's needed is more of a nexus thing where there's evidence multiple people work together or some long track record of someone scratching a very specific itch. Or if we're all using agents to build the same thing some way for them to team up. It's a sort of proof of life thing and it's difficult to distinguish those from flashes in the pan.
ourcat 18d ago
Vibe coded or not, Spotify is a disgusting company for artists, however fast or fancy it's made.
Skwid 18d ago
If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely. Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme [1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
ramon156 18d ago
I'd love to put in some love and effort into a Spotify replacemeny that supports jams. I'd share the app with friends. I needed an excuse to make a cross-platform app anyway.
ginsmar 18d ago
To play your local music: https://yunomusica.com/ https://yunomusica.com/
cyberclimb 18d ago
nice that it supports ARM Linux! This is a major gap with the official Spotify desktop app
baxuz 18d ago
Fastslopify
arajnoha 18d ago
Just came to say that official client (all its processes combined) uses 1.1Gb of RAM on my macbook air, while this, playing the same track from the same playlist and nothing else, gets only up to 280Mb
- piker 18d ago
  Because the official client is an electron app.
- Retr0id 18d ago
  That's an improvement for sure, but 280MB also seems like a lot.
- flyingjoe 18d ago
  I came here to say the opposite. Running on MacOS 15.7 the original Client uses ~200mb and Fastpotify uses ~500mb playing the same song while being substantially slower when navigating music. EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB. However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify
Retr0id 18d ago
Interesting. I've always wanted something like this. The official Spotify player sucks in many ways, but the UI/UX is decent, or at the very least I'm used to it now. All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1. But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.
som 18d ago
Love the Winamp feature - but more so that it comes with milkdrop! That is next level. What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)
prinny_ 18d ago
This may be a low effort comment but I just wanted to say that there was a missed opportunity to call this project Spotifast.
rot256 18d ago
Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples: - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. - When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
- HeadOfProbing 17d ago
  I couldn't disagree more
- jcul 17d ago
  Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.
- amboo7 14d ago
  You should have tried Deezer. I had switched to Spotify because I couldn't tolerate bugs anymore.
- zipy124 18d ago
  It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.
- NaiveBayesian 18d ago
  Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
- 18d ago
sceptic123 18d ago
Looks good, but ran into loading spinners fairly quickly, large playlists kill this, I suspect because the api is not properly respecting the cache headers and is refetching the same information repeatedly and thus getting rate limited. Also Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions. Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).
- sceptic123 18d ago
  Also doesn't seem to remember player position between app openings
yonisto 18d ago
Serious question: down the road, what's the point of such a UI? (Don't get me wrong, I really like and enjoy it!) My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it. Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?
quyleanh 18d ago
It’s relied on librespot so cannot work with free account.
djhworld 18d ago
I might be misremembering, but I swear when Spotify launched it was a big revelation at the time because the client was super fast and playback was almost instantaneous. This was a big deal as other music players like iTunes were bloated. Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library. Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine? Anyway, cool to see projects like this
- lysace 18d ago
  You're remembering correctly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654 What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client. Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous. We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire. Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app. It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs. (The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)
haaz 18d ago
always thought the spotify ui was really really good, it just has way more features and feels like it is made by a great team that actually uses the app and has input over it's design, vs apple music which is just a normal app that feels like it was made by a committee
stuaxo 18d ago
One of the things I liked the least about spotify is typing in a song name, and then getting a infinite list of every song named like that. I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.
sota_pop 18d ago
Kudos, I have been carrying exactly this on my personal “to do” projects list for quite some time. Looks really nice!
azraellzanella 18d ago
As one more option -> https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.
- echoangle 18d ago
  There's also this as an official solution: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-spotify-soloist https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...
swah 18d ago
Doesn't play but looks just like the original.
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
Waterluvian 18d ago
Spotify on Ubuntu one day stopped outputting audio and never again could I get it to work. How do you screw up the one thing your app needs to do?!
toomasr 18d ago
Now we just need an iOS app that doesn't offer you a choice of speakers on every open and you can just hit play as you intended
dzonga 18d ago
whether vibe coded (which it is) or not - this is free work for a corporation. that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.
vehemenz 18d ago
I can’t speak for mobile, but the desktop/web product has been a disaster for years. When Spotify went full Electron a few years back, a bunch of standard macOS keyboard shortcuts stopped working. These issues were on their “support” forum for years before being automatically closed.
TKAB 18d ago
oh my god. The WinAMP mode is awesome! Probably been waiting for this to be available on macOS for 20 years.
sandrew17 18d ago
The classic skins are bringing me back. Well done.
angelofthe0dd 18d ago
I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.
ljouhet 18d ago
I used `cargo install --path . --locked` to install (had an error when compiling `librespot`)
cdrnsf 18d ago
I've been using Navidrome for a while and love it (long enough to have written an iOS + macOS client). I mount my music from a B2 bucket and use a shell script to sync additions to it. AudioMuse-AI does a great job generating playlists and populating similar artists. There are lyrics plugins, an Apple Music plugin that can populate metadata and on and on. It's a great system and free from the catalogue rot and slop that's been eroding the benefits of streaming for a while now.
infomiho 18d ago
I had the same urge recently, I got tired of huge RAM use. It looks much less cool, but it suits my needs. Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence https://github.com/infomiho/cadence
mjaniczek 18d ago
I like the idea of a fast Spotify player, but I can't get over my doubts of LLM code quality when the audio playback stutters even with the 200ms output buffer setting (on macOS).
khernandezrt 18d ago
Other than having abysmal inconsistencies in their UI, ive never had any problems with the native Spotify app. I've been using Spotify for 10 years now and when im on my PC i open the app, either put my Podcast or song and then minimize it. Didnt know people had such issues with the app.
baggachipz 18d ago
Go easy on Spotify, they don't have much budget left after paying ungodly sums of money for exclusive contracts with nazi-enablers.
eonmatrix 18d ago
Cool project. Building it on Fedora is another story.
drooopy 18d ago
I find spotify to be more bloated now than iTunes was when apple pulled the plug on it.
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
jeffgreco 18d ago
This is cool. A few small thoughts: - would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today. - Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state - Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit - Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode - Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?
stan-ely 18d ago
Looks neat, i hope the librespot issues from the initial days don't come up here
harel 18d ago
This looks great, I'll give it a try. It seems like most of the comments focus on how this was created, whether it's vibe coded, agent engineered, LLM assisted or however you want to term this. On one hand, I am sad at the collapse of my craft. I love building things in code, figuring it out from the system design to the last compile. On the other hand, I love how productive I am now. How I can complete tasks faster. As someone mentioned, there is a very larger distance between "I vibed coded it and I don't know how it worked" to "I built it and I used LLMs to assist the process". It is possible to design a system, and instruct LLMs to write code for you. Task them the actual act of code writing, not feature development. It's not "build me a music player" but "I'm building a music player that works like so, and you will now write me the play button component that will behave like so and so, focusing on this or that, paying attention to x, y and z and avoiding a, b and c". Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...
alejoar 18d ago
Doesn't appear to find Nest speakers :( I'd use it otherwise, this is great.
braggerxyz 18d ago
I use Strawberry as my music player on Linux, which is a native Qt app and has Spotify integration. No need for the spotify app. Strawberry has great collection support as I own thousands of ripped CDs.
- mdnahas 18d ago
  I just looked at Strawberry. Spotify is done via a GStreamer plug-in. It looks like you have to compile it yourself.
DressOrc 18d ago
oh wow, Ive been waiting for this for years, its insane we run entire browsers just to play music. Very excited to try this out
j1elo 18d ago
I've been using Slint as UI toolkit for Rust and so far liked it, coming as I am from the Qt/QML world. However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses) [1]: https://slint.dev/ https://slint.dev/ [2]: https://www.egui.rs/ https://www.egui.rs/ Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?
bilekas 18d ago
My worry with this, like all Spotify clients really, is its dependance on Spotify's, quite litteraly, worst public facing API that is known to exist. I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.
qgin 18d ago
Not helpful for Linux users, but FYI both the Windows and Mac Apple Music clients are native apps.
kermatt 18d ago
I recently went through most of the Spotify clients I could find on GitHub, looking for something "lean", including screen real estate. Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist. Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern". I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.
hndqbrg2uk 18d ago
Nice to see fastpotify framed this way — I'd been circling the same idea without the right words.
Dansvidania 18d ago
I would welcome a mobile counterpart to this, if it is even possible. The iOS app is even worse.
poody 17d ago
I use youtube music.. It has everything I listen to and more.. Want an obscure college band (Go ZURCHER) ? .. It is there! Want some rare DnB (source direct).. It is there? Want a curated ambient collection? It is there! UX is totally fine on Apple and Android..
- exp1orer 17d ago
  I tried switching from Spotify to Youtube Music but the "download for offline" functionality is incredibly broken -- often doesn't recognize that it's on wifi to start downloading, multiple minutes to download an album that Spotify downloads in a few seconds, and for a longer playlist the pause/resume when you go off wifi doesn't work at all.
phusion 17d ago
Took a very long time to get it to sign in and play on my local machine... we'll see if it's worth switching from the official client.
dj24 17d ago
It uses 495mb on my machine, slightly false claims
legohead 17d ago
If this player has true random playing of your songs, instant sell for me. Also, a mobile version would be great, even if I have to do a manual install. Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it. And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway. [1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platforms-Option-to-have-a-true-shuffle/idi-p/4880594#comments https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platf...
- HDThoreaun 17d ago
  The most sickening part of this is that it isn’t actually broken, it’s working exactly how Spotify wants. Spotify thinks we are so stupid we actually want their janky “shuffle” that doesn’t work properly.
skarz 17d ago
But can my daughter, who has a Managed Account, use this?
flyingshelf 17d ago
I never understood the complaints about Spotify. Apple Music behaved like crap with something as simple as being offline, to me it's always been a no-brainer to use Spotify over anything else.
pqdbr 17d ago
Carmine is cooking. His work on RubyLLM has been incredible, even going as far as upstreaming important work about fiber usage into Rails Solid Queue so that we reap the Async benefits, which are essential in this LLM age.
christosk92 17d ago
I think it's cool people are making custom clients. I actually am working on my own client: WaveeMusic (https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic). I decided not to base it on librespot because it still talks to Spotify's old AP audiokey channel. Official clients don't use that path anymore, it already refuses accounts created after ~2023, and Spotify can turn it off whenever they want. I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.
internet_points 17d ago
I'm using Qobuz now, they have both downloads and streaming, and apparently pay the artist more than any of the other streaming alternatives. I've found all the music I've looked for there too (including some artists that dropped Spotify). Quite happy with everything except maybe the name ..
maxrev17 17d ago
These apps and systems have hard quirks built in to make you learn them then find the alternatives jarring so you don’t switch. It’s a retention trick by engineers who know what they’re doing. As many pointed out decent music player/library ux was solved yonks ago.
ergocoder 17d ago
I've stopped using Spotify for 2 years now. What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.
actinium226 17d ago
I don't really get the comments about Spotify having a terrible UX, works fine for me. It uses 300 MB of RAM on my MacBook. Saving 50MB of RAM in exchange for losing the ability to play lossless files isn't a trade I want to make. Cool project though, will keep an eye on it.
ICHx 17d ago
Time to leave electron amid the ram crisis
mansilladev 17d ago
For me, stock Spotify client on Mac is using ~200MB RAM (no videos / canvas). I probably need to try a leaner build on Fastspotify (built it myself from source), bug the damn thing was using ~350MB RAM. Both RAM counts were based on initial load + playing one song.
- boguscoder 17d ago
  have you summed up all the Spotify Helper processes from Chrome? alas its way beyond 200MB. But I just built and ran release build of fastpotify and its also hovering in 500s
mayli 17d ago
> It starts in well under a second and typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM. Hmm, a music player now use much RAM :/
rickreynoldssf 17d ago
To give you an idea of the kinds of Engineering decisions going on at Spotify, they do thousands of deploys per day and are PROUD of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g Must be one of THE WORST engineering orgs running right now.
rubymamis 17d ago
Like this, but the problem with such immediate mode GUI apps is that they constantly burn 1-2% of CPU when the app is idle. A waste of compute and power.
paaloeye 17d ago
Saw it's Rust, closed immediately.
tarwin 17d ago
If you want this experience but don't want Spotify may I suggest my "amp" app - you can get it on tinyjs.app It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want! And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too. It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.
arnefm 17d ago
Suddenly I couldn't resolve fastpotify.rocks in DNS. Quad9 is now blocking this domain for some reason. https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester ThreatStop lists the following info: Severity Level: 5 of 5 Confidence Level: 5 of 5 Risk Level: 4 of 5 I assume this is a false positive, but who can be sure in this day and age...
stronglikedan 17d ago
Unfortunately this won't fix the atrocious recommendation system. I really wish these music services could just license Pandora's system. Since Pandora won't add high quality streams, they may as well offer a license to make up for the money they leave on the table monthly. The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it? If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.

855 points by nreece 18d ago

bjord 18d ago

need this for android. on average, it takes genuinely about five minutes to open—I think it reindexes my entire micro sd card every time.

deleted 17d ago

[deleted]

brikym 17d ago

This looks amazing but unfortunately this project is doing free work for Spotify rather than brining competition they need. The root problem is that the content access is so gatekept. Apple music opens on it's own. Spotify is junk. YouTube music isn't much better. They've all become lazy and need a shake up.

avidruntime 17d ago

Cant seem to get milkdrop to work on the binary installed via cask on arm macOS. Everything else feels very snappy and fun

milk2540 17d ago

Please make an android port Please god I will pay

grougnax 17d ago

[dead]

pikzel 17d ago

Very promising, but works poorly. Playlists load in ~10s, app crashed after a few minutes. Vibe-coded low-quality app.

petreradu 17d ago

For me, it gets the job done, which is mainly managing the hundreds of podcast episodes I am bookmarking (and probably never listen to). Or maybe the iOS version is a bit better than the Android one.

_rwo 16d ago

took few sessions to re-slop this to OpenSubsonic (navidrome compat) backend; didn't even looked once at the code, I love and hate the future we live in thanks again for sharing!

aleksandrm 15d ago

Too bad this requires a Premium subscription, can't use this without one.

mock-possum 15d ago

hmm I wanted to like this, but for me it's noticeably slower/laggier than the official spotify app, and it's missing common ui features (you can't multi-select and delete from a playlist)

paaloeye 15d ago

The only problem with macOS Spotify, in my opinion, is audio thread isn't isolated to system performance and it can drop audio frames under load. Yes, it's Electron and it's a full browser under the hood, but given the complexity of the UI, it's a fair trade-off. I'd love to see some like headless Spotify client on macOS.

SnowingXIV 12d ago

> Local playback tops out at 320 kbps. Spotify protects its lossless streams with DRM that librespot does not support, and Fastpotify will not circumvent it. This can change if lawful support lands upstream. I was interested until this bit, and it is a shame. Not the developers issue, but man that's frustrating.

zoky 18d ago

It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?

hdjrudni 18d ago
It really whips the llama's ass?

ralfhn 18d ago

It takes five minutes to make a website look less obviously AI-generated.

brendanmc6 18d ago
It takes five seconds to scroll to the bottom and see that it's a Jekyll theme before posting a negative comment
- danilafe 18d ago
  Surely they're referring to the llm-isms in the text?
- minitech 18d ago
  A Jekyll theme from the same person as this project, yes.
p-e-w 18d ago
The website looks great to me, clean and simple, perfect for a project like this. “Not looking like it was made by AI” isn’t something I value for itself in a website, any more than “not looking like it was made with injection molding” is something I would value in a plastic item. Either it’s good or it isn’t, but it’s not good or bad because of how it was made.
- xxs 18d ago
  > “not looking like it was made with injection molding” Aside machining POM, what else is there. Injection molding tend to be great.
famahar 18d ago
If it was a site made with AI it would be stuffed with way more ad copy, components, UI toggles, and small text. If this was made with AI, they seem to have restrained it from going on the gaudy UI mess of most AI generated sites that are what I like to think of as "Maximalist Minimalist". A hodgepodge of a design library.

wilted-iris 18d ago

Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.

nan60 18d ago
> radio for discovery Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
- dylan604 18d ago
  > radio for discovery was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
  - BLKNSLVR 18d ago
    This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well. https://threedradio.com/ https://threedradio.com/ I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way. Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).

fishgoesblub 18d ago

Spotify used to use Qt for its desktop client. Good times.

occz 18d ago
This is actually wrong, it was never QT. It was however not built with web technologies back in the day
reddalo 18d ago
Good times. The old Spotify client was native and fast. I miss that. The new one is heavy and clunky.
AtNightWeCode 18d ago
Did it really? I remember that Wimp used Adobe Air and Deezer used Flash.

Walf 18d ago

Fuck Spotify. Even if you don't care about the ethics of Daniel Ek's investments, the platform itself is crap. One of the lowest paying to artists, not paying at all unless they hit a threshold, and the catalogue is filling up with AI slop, which they push on users via 'radio' and 'mix' playlists, so they can pay even less royalties. No, thanks.

SuperMouse 18d ago
I've tested Deezer for half a year. The software quality was horrible. Had a lot of crashes, it often took many many seconds to change between the songs and often getting stuck, the buffering algorithm was nuts and eating a lot of bandwidth. Everything on a standard Pixel. Full 5G coverage was available. Alternatives?
- Walf 18d ago
  Tried Tidal? The one gripe I have with it is no remote control, as in using phone to change what's currently playing on the device connected to my sound system, without it thinking I want to start playing on my phone. Apple Music pays artists better, too.
- cmehdy 18d ago
  Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly. Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.
  - jorisw 18d ago
    Seriously tried Tidal. Gave up on it because of the software quality.
- zcrar70 18d ago
  Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client. Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile. [0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-platforms/ https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...

monster_truck 18d ago

I hacked the official client apart to hide some bullshit (like podcasts) and fix bugs that were pissing me off. Shared it exactly once and it stopped working within a month. Bugs were still there too I stopped sharing after that.

figmert 18d ago
Have you seen Spicetify[0]? It allows for this kind of stuff and seems to be a lot more stable than doing it all manually. [0] https://spicetify.app/ https://spicetify.app/
- monster_truck 17d ago
  I have, it's good, but it is not compatible with some of the things I am doing which are quite a bit more foundational/stuctural. The pile of scripts I've accumulated do a pretty good job of resolving easy breakages, listing anything worse, and running a little lap around all of my typical interactions (from another account running in a cloud vm) to diff the network requests so I look normal to them.

rixed 18d ago

Another site tricking users willing to look at the code into starring the repo instead. How desperate do you need to be to resort to this?

yedpodtrzitko 18d ago
I had to read the comment a few times. Do you mean "starring" instead of "starting"?
- rixed 18d ago
  Yes sorry, fixed. Thanks!
earcar 18d ago
No. The "Star" button is a simple link to the repo.
- rixed 17d ago
  I stand corrected, and I'm glad i was wrong.

exitb 18d ago

It’s not specific to this program, but I lately get this feeling that distributing widely a piece of software that exists for 5 days and saw a dozen releases in that period is stretching the open source trust model.

krekr 17d ago
Think of something nerds will like (like this!), package malware, distribute, profit. That's the idea, right?

punarinta 18d ago

Software has finally started to get faster, and I love it. Pls don't consider this a spam, but if anyone is interested in a fast native Slack client, I'm building one, since Slack themselves don't want to: https://msga.app https://msga.app

rsolva 18d ago
Just tried your slack client, it has all the features I need and it is super smooth and lightweight, thanks!
ainiriand 18d ago
Make MSTeams Great Again when? Amazing work btw.
- sceptic123 18d ago
  Teams was never great to start with
- idonotknowwhy 18d ago
  I just looked through the slop Readme file, it looks like teams is supported.
  - punarinta 18d ago
    Yes, Teams is supported, but since their API is really poor compared to Slack, the support is pretty limited.
Shorel 18d ago
Love it. I did the same for Postman/Bruno.

nalekberov 18d ago

Without looking at the codebase I am pretty sure it’s a vibe coded rust app, because this is what today’s most programmers understand about software.

tetrisgm 18d ago
and?
- worldsavior 18d ago
  That's boring, and unmaintainable.
  - txdv 18d ago
    until someone comes up with a non vibe coded one ill be happy having at least a fast option
  - dzikimarian 18d ago
    It's working way better than original client. What does it say about Spotify devs?
txdv 18d ago
the commits are very fine grained and the text is unusually not AI. I mean you can beat AI to do anything nowadays, but this looks not that bad
- ghosty141 18d ago
  I'd argue nobody writes such long commit messages this consistently. I'm VERY sure this is fully AI generated.
- TonyStr 18d ago
  The volume of commits is quite crazy. For example, he wrote a +486/-51 commit in 20 minutes (33287cb) with quite dense rust code. That's about 25 changes per minute -- very impressive! The docs also smell of LLM output, for example describing the app as native despite using egui/wgpu. But hey, he's here, we can just ask him! @earcar

mappu 18d ago

If you're focused on lightweight, native and fast, I don't think you should use an immediate-mode GUI toolkit. Why does an app like this need to hit a 60fps framerate? It's not a game.

winrid 18d ago
Most immediate mode does a scene graph diff so it's not that bad I have a custom IM GUIs based ide thing in C++ that uses like .2% of my 10yo CPU.
- IshKebab 18d ago
  Egui doesn't do that. But it's written in Rust and only updates when you interact with it so in practice it's way more efficient than I would have expected.
  - winrid 16d ago
    as a side note I absolutely hated writing UIs in egui. It is a really nice framework, but the iteration times were painful.
mijoharas 18d ago
I was surprised to see an immediate mode gui toolkit. They're great to integrate into a game loop because you control your loop, (and they're a delight to use) but I thought for perf retained mode was the way to go? Am I missing something? Then again if the bar needing to be beaten is spotify's existing desktop app maybe it doesn't matter?
- deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]
earcar 18d ago
Author here. Two reasons I chose an immediate mode UI framework: 1. Latency. A click paints on the next frame, because it sidesteps the stages of a retained mode UI: there's no dirty-marking, no layout and paint passes scheduled for later, no cached visual state that can be stale. 2. Simplicity. The UI is a plain function of app state. There's no retained tree to keep in sync and no invalidation bugs: mutate the state and the next frame shows it. Yes, the drawback is that you have to watch what a frame costs, but it doesn't repaint at every frame. It paints on input and you can schedule repaints yourself. Fastpotify sits at zero CPU when idle, asks for a few frames a second while a track plays, and runs at full rate only while you scroll.

armcat 18d ago

You had me at Winamp

angelofthe0dd 18d ago
Winamp was peak.

winrid 18d ago

[dead]

drxzcl 18d ago

That seems like the kind of name that's gonna earn you a C&D.

broodbucket 18d ago

Would be great if it could get included in Flathub, without it, I'd rather have an AppImage than a Flatpak file I think

TnS-hun 18d ago

It is a shame that Spotify have not made their Dear ImGui-based version available: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-604711590 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-60...

abrookewood 18d ago

I think the key call out with this is how cool egui is (the Rust GUI library it uses). Check out their website: https://www.egui.rs/ https://www.egui.rs/ The demos are very good: https://www.egui.rs/#clock https://www.egui.rs/#clock Edit: egui is an immediate mode GUI library written in Rust. egui runs natively on , and on the web it is compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGL or WebGPU. Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust.

project2501 17d ago
on Firefox and Windows, it's a disaster in addition to what other comments pointed out, on the demo ( https://www.egui.rs/#demo https://www.egui.rs/#demo ) if you have a sidebar open, there is an offset of approximately the sidebar's width (though not exactly) between the system's mouse pointer position and the web app
WithinReason 18d ago
The anti-aliasing is broken, it doesn't apply gamma correction
- IshKebab 18d ago
  Did you look at it recently? Until a few months ago text was a blurry mess but it seems like they've mostly fixed it now.
troupo 18d ago
> Everything you see is rendered as textured triangles. There is no DOM, HTML, JS or CSS. Just Rust. So that's why text selection doesn't work.
Fumblenuts 18d ago
This feels like it would be an accessibility nightmare? But maybe it could be cool for doing some advanced animations or rendering games or something.
TonyStr 18d ago

slaye 18d ago

https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ https://fastpotify.rocks/winamp/ what a great feature!

deleted 18d ago

[deleted]

0fflineuser 18d ago

If anyone is interested in selfhosting or wants to stop using spotify without losing the discoverabily: I use explo+slsk+lidarr+navidrome, for access on my phone I use dsub2000 or symfonium but mainly dsub2000. Explo is the software used for the discovery https://github.com/LumePart/Explo https://github.com/LumePart/Explo It automatically downloads daily jams, weekly jams and weekly exploration playlists from your listenbrainz account(free) using youtube, soulseek(with slskd) or lidarr (support was merged very recently). I also imported all my artists from my spotify account when I migrated which you can do in lidarr with the plugin ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶ bellow ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶.̶ plugin: https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry https://github.com/TypNull/Tubifarry ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶d̶o̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ ̶i̶m̶a̶g̶e̶:̶ ̶g̶h̶c̶r̶.̶i̶o̶/̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶-̶l̶a̶b̶s̶/̶p̶r̶a̶r̶r̶:̶l̶i̶d̶a̶r̶r̶-̶p̶l̶u̶g̶i̶n̶s̶ docker image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly This plugin is also needed for downloading songs with slsk in lidarr.

mbonnet 16d ago
you've listed eight different software doodads I'd need to accomplish what my one Spotify app that gives me access to everything I need for $15 does.
kombine 18d ago
I'm using a similar setup with soularr, and I just need to import my playlists from Spotify, but I'd rather not use a fork of lidarr.
- 0fflineuser 18d ago
  Hi, Actually it's not a fork it's the docker image for the plugin branch. Sorry I set this up quite a long while ago and didn't remember correctly. And it seems to have been merged so the plugin branch is not needed anymore, see: https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829 https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/pull/1829 So the official image would work. edit: I just migrated and I can confirm it works. I used lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:nightly, note that the `latest` tag won't work as it's using the `master` branch which doesn't have plugin support yet, so either use the `nightly` tag or the `develop` tag. See: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-tags https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-lidarr/#version-ta...

egeozcan 18d ago

Winamp feature is great but so random, and I love how it's listed as if it's a usual feature expected from any music player. Hoping for a future in which people complain about missing basic functionality like winamp mode being missing in their music player of choice! Let me start: I was going to recommend foobar2000 with the spotify plugin but the lack of a winamp mode must be a dealbreaker for many!

devindotcom 18d ago
I get around the lack of such a mode by still using winamp!

gitowiec 18d ago

When I saw the Winamp skin I had to hold to not cry

sznio 18d ago

I've been thinking recently about buying an AI-capable GPU and using it to reverse-enginner and debloat apps I use every day. It seems like a task that even a dumber AI model could do. Disassemble the app, then either cut the things I don't care about, or just implement it fresh in a correct way.

IshKebab 18d ago
I don't think models that run on single GPUs are capable of that yet sadly. You still need to spend ~$100k to get an actually good local LLM. Correct me if I'm wrong, local AI guys. It's really hard to get actually numbers on this stuff, but to run e.g. GLM 5.3 Flash as far as I can tell you need one of those super expensive 8 GPU machines.
- doublerabbit 18d ago
  Aye, and those 8GPU machines are expensive. Powering 2x GPU for GLM is eye watering expense, £5k a month.
- sznio 18d ago
  if i tasked it with "create spotify" I'd need that much. asking it to "disassemble Spotify and find out the minimal code path needed to play a song" is much more in reach. I don't need it to oneshot it. If it gets stuck, I've read enough disassembled C to figure it out and get it unblocked. Instead of banging my head against a binary for 5 hours, I'll have my agent bang it's weights for 20 hours, then put in my 1 hour of polish. My first task would be to fix the Android version of Facebook Messenger. My friends still stick with it because they have iPhones, and that version works fine. I have been putting up with broken image previews for 2 years now. I'll fix that fucking wild pointer they don't care about and make it usable as a chat app. And I'll remove the ads while at that.
  - Shorel 18d ago
    Qwen 3.8 will do it, but it will probably require 72 hours or more.

earcar 18d ago

Author here. Happy to answer any questions!

jorisw 18d ago
This app is a dream come true for me. As a user I'm heavily invested in Spotify but I've grown more and more irritated with their client. Especially the recommendations, which thankfully are largely absent from your client. Would love a setting to also remove the "Made for you" section, as well as the "Recommended for you" section, both on the home page. I was using Spicetify to customize the official client to this effect, using CSS.
jorisw 18d ago
Per another comment, is it true that you trick people wanting to view your code on GitHub, into starring your repo?
- earcar 18d ago
  No. The "Star" button on the website is a simple link to the repo.
mijoharas 18d ago
I was curious about the choice of an immediate mode rather than retained GUI toolkit. Could you speak a little more about the trade-offs and decisions there w.r.t. performance. (Nice work btw, seems very interesting!) C.f. this comment[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519099
- earcar 18d ago
  Thanks for the link, I responded there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519723
benjaomin 18d ago
I takes several seconds to load the Queue, what's happening there?

GuestFAUniverse 18d ago

That name is horrible. Potify sounds like a toddler is learning to take a dump. And well, putting "fast" in front of it doesn't impress either in that case.

Traubenfuchs 18d ago
Potify, the scientifically proven way to get toddlers potty trained, with wearables, app support and an AI coach.

merrvk 18d ago

Tried using Spotify web client on Safari the other day. Performance was absolutely terrible. For comparison I was using Apple Music via safari before. I’m just surprised that such a big company can produce such an awful web experience, guess everyone is just using the native app, but for some that’s not possible

skor 18d ago

if you want to discover new music, have a look at nts.live

alexyoung 18d ago

I realise I’m pissing into the wind here, but I find the LLM text on the homepage and docs quite funny/ awkward. > “Ctrl+M turns it into a tiny player that wears any classic Winamp 2 skin, spectrum analyser, equalizer, and playlist included. 2000s vibes, pixel for pixel.” Everything is said with too much intensity, and phrasing that sounds impressive but doesn’t really mean that much. Like “wears any classic Winamp 2 skin” feels so awkward, what’s “wears”? You mean it can use it? I feel like if you can’t be bothered to write the code, at least document it yourself and write the marketing copy so I know you understand the product. Otherwise how can I trust running it on my computer? Did the LLM generate some amazing rm -rf somewhere, or another blunder that wrecks data I might care about?

doublerabbit 18d ago
I too enjoy wearing the RealPlayer skin of the 90's. Makes me look very chic.
- bryanrasmussen 18d ago
  If the last twenty years of horror movies have taught me anything it is that maybe you can't be a real player, but you can always wear their skin!
jcarrano 18d ago
If it can transform into Winamp I don't care if the code is LLM generated, typed by infinite monkeys or found in some ancient scrolls. Jokes aside, how can you be sure that the official Spotify app (or any app, or Windows) was not written by a LLM without supervision?
- phatfish 18d ago
  The official Spotify app has some skin in the game. Random dudes self promotion project, not so much.
  - ornornor 18d ago

dylanger 18d ago

[dead]

progbits 18d ago

What do you all use to buy music these days? I've been slowly trying to stop my spotify usage and replace it with owned audio files. Mostly I try to use Bandcamp but many artists are not there. Sometimes I just rip the audio from youtube but would prefer a way to buy that gives most of the money to the artist.

smcleod 18d ago
Bandcamp, and I have on several occasions emailed the band directly and asked if I could purchase directly from them.
sznio 18d ago
I go to the weekly flea market and sometimes find something that interests me
embedding-shape 18d ago
Saving everything until Bandcamp Fridays for the ones on Bandcamp, otherwise pretty much Beatport or not buying it at all. Some labels I've listened to for a long time (like Liquicity) I buy the music straight from their store, figure the artist/label gets the most then.
aorth 18d ago
After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
dotancohen 18d ago
Are compact discs no longer available? I used to rip from those - every album I've ever downloaded and kept I have the CD for. Some bought before the download, many bought after. But it's been a long time since I've heard anything good enough to purchase.
- VilleSalonen 18d ago
  [dead]

amadeuspagel 18d ago

It's hard to think of a name worse then "spotify" itself, but fast "fastpotify" may be it.

mrmincent 18d ago

I would pay reasonable money for a similar native MS Teams client. I now run teams on a separate laptop to avoid it killing my main work machine.

NoboruWataya 18d ago

Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you. The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't. Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify. As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.

Ciantic 18d ago

Very cool. I'm cloning the repo, just in case it gets taken down. I've been using EGUI, but its biggest problem is that LLMs really struggle with it. There isn't enough good examples of it. This codebase seems to have a lot of good examples, so given this as a reference, one might make a lot of progress much faster.

smcleod 18d ago

I wish someone would do this for Apple Music. Their app is dreadful!

Semkas 18d ago

Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person. Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.

yitchelle 18d ago
As a matter of interest, would seeing a full disclosure that vibe coding was used sway your decision one way or the other?
- Citizen_Lame 18d ago
  Due to security and future updates, yes.
- matsemann 18d ago
  Yes, a project maintained and built over longer time has a bigger chance of staying relevant, than someone's weekend fun they will abandon once the dopamine hit of "making something" wears off.
  - slowin 18d ago
    Isn't software written by hand more likely to be abandoned due to the extremely costly nature of keeping its development going? Abandonware definitely existed prior to vibe coding. As long as it's open source, now you can pick it up and keep vibe-developing it if you care to, for very little money/effort.
    - fluidcruft 17d ago
      Possibly, but sunk costs fallacy often means it's possible to rely on the maintainer to stick around. I think we all know how disposable LLM-generated code can be. If I wanted to vibe code my own thing, I'd do it my way rather than fork an abandoned project. What's needed is more of a nexus thing where there's evidence multiple people work together or some long track record of someone scratching a very specific itch. Or if we're all using agents to build the same thing some way for them to team up. It's a sort of proof of life thing and it's difficult to distinguish those from flashes in the pan.

ourcat 18d ago

Vibe coded or not, Spotify is a disgusting company for artists, however fast or fancy it's made.

Skwid 18d ago

If anyone wants a lightweight, GUI, non-slopcoded spotify client I find spotify-qt[1] does the job nicely. Alas, it wears only the skin of your system QT theme [1] https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt

ramon156 18d ago

I'd love to put in some love and effort into a Spotify replacemeny that supports jams. I'd share the app with friends. I needed an excuse to make a cross-platform app anyway.

ginsmar 18d ago

To play your local music: https://yunomusica.com/ https://yunomusica.com/

cyberclimb 18d ago

nice that it supports ARM Linux! This is a major gap with the official Spotify desktop app

baxuz 18d ago

Fastslopify

arajnoha 18d ago

Just came to say that official client (all its processes combined) uses 1.1Gb of RAM on my macbook air, while this, playing the same track from the same playlist and nothing else, gets only up to 280Mb

piker 18d ago
Because the official client is an electron app.
Retr0id 18d ago
That's an improvement for sure, but 280MB also seems like a lot.
flyingjoe 18d ago
I came here to say the opposite. Running on MacOS 15.7 the original Client uses ~200mb and Fastpotify uses ~500mb playing the same song while being substantially slower when navigating music. EDIT: I forgot about the Spotify Helper processes - taken into account the original spotify needs ~1GB. However it's still a lot faster than Fastpotify

Retr0id 18d ago

Interesting. I've always wanted something like this. The official Spotify player sucks in many ways, but the UI/UX is decent, or at the very least I'm used to it now. All the other lightweight Spotify clients roll their own UIs in ways that I don't like, so I really appreciate that their LLM has taken the time to clone the UI 1:1. But now I have to decide if I want someone else's vibecode on my computer. I think not.

som 18d ago

Love the Winamp feature - but more so that it comes with milkdrop! That is next level. What would YouTube music support look like? And another random feature request - universal playlist import / export (i.e. take my YouTube playlist and convert it to Spotify and vice versa - Rosetta stone style)

prinny_ 18d ago

This may be a low effort comment but I just wanted to say that there was a missed opportunity to call this project Spotifast.

rot256 18d ago

Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples: - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. - When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?

HeadOfProbing 17d ago
I couldn't disagree more
jcul 17d ago
Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.
amboo7 14d ago
You should have tried Deezer. I had switched to Spotify because I couldn't tolerate bugs anymore.
zipy124 18d ago
It's actually crazy that a music app struggles to play music many times. By far my worst big app experience.
NaiveBayesian 18d ago
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
18d ago

sceptic123 18d ago

Looks good, but ran into loading spinners fairly quickly, large playlists kill this, I suspect because the api is not properly respecting the cache headers and is refetching the same information repeatedly and thus getting rate limited. Also Once that happened I wasn't then sure if issues I'm seeing are from api or the app itself. It's possible this is prioritising the responsiveness of the UI rather than the actual speed of user interactions. Also the menu bar icon doesn't work for me (on MacOs). I can see it, but it doesn't do anything and there's nothing in the app itself to enable/disable it (though thankfully it does respect cmd+drag to delete).

sceptic123 18d ago
Also doesn't seem to remember player position between app openings

yonisto 18d ago

Serious question: down the road, what's the point of such a UI? (Don't get me wrong, I really like and enjoy it!) My spouse, for example, doesn't interact with her clock app anymore—she just talks to it. Wouldn't many programs just use a local LLM to perform whatever is needed?

quyleanh 18d ago

It’s relied on librespot so cannot work with free account.

djhworld 18d ago

I might be misremembering, but I swear when Spotify launched it was a big revelation at the time because the client was super fast and playback was almost instantaneous. This was a big deal as other music players like iTunes were bloated. Obviously streaming was the big selling point, something that iTunes didn’t offer at the time, but I swear the client was written in some native UI framework, along with the C/C++ library. Or was the spotify UI always just a browser engine skin and the perception of speed was from the playback engine? Anyway, cool to see projects like this

lysace 18d ago
You're remembering correctly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654 What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client. Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous. We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire. Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app. It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs. (The comment is from a 2021 post about another Rust-based Spotify client.)

haaz 18d ago

always thought the spotify ui was really really good, it just has way more features and feels like it is made by a great team that actually uses the app and has input over it's design, vs apple music which is just a normal app that feels like it was made by a committee

stuaxo 18d ago

One of the things I liked the least about spotify is typing in a song name, and then getting a infinite list of every song named like that. I want the song to be a starting point, like Last.fm radio was, I almost never want to listen to every version of it.

sota_pop 18d ago

Kudos, I have been carrying exactly this on my personal “to do” projects list for quite some time. Looks really nice!

azraellzanella 18d ago

As one more option -> https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd I've been using it for a while, shows up as a speaker, and uses around 25-40MB of RAM.

echoangle 18d ago
There's also this as an official solution: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-spotify-soloist https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...

swah 18d ago

Doesn't play but looks just like the original.

deleted 18d ago

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Waterluvian 18d ago

Spotify on Ubuntu one day stopped outputting audio and never again could I get it to work. How do you screw up the one thing your app needs to do?!

toomasr 18d ago

Now we just need an iOS app that doesn't offer you a choice of speakers on every open and you can just hit play as you intended

dzonga 18d ago

whether vibe coded (which it is) or not - this is free work for a corporation. that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.

vehemenz 18d ago

I can’t speak for mobile, but the desktop/web product has been a disaster for years. When Spotify went full Electron a few years back, a bunch of standard macOS keyboard shortcuts stopped working. These issues were on their “support” forum for years before being automatically closed.

TKAB 18d ago

oh my god. The WinAMP mode is awesome! Probably been waiting for this to be available on macOS for 20 years.

sandrew17 18d ago

The classic skins are bringing me back. Well done.

angelofthe0dd 18d ago

I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.

ljouhet 18d ago

I used `cargo install --path . --locked` to install (had an error when compiling `librespot`)

cdrnsf 18d ago

I've been using Navidrome for a while and love it (long enough to have written an iOS + macOS client). I mount my music from a B2 bucket and use a shell script to sync additions to it. AudioMuse-AI does a great job generating playlists and populating similar artists. There are lyrics plugins, an Apple Music plugin that can populate metadata and on and on. It's a great system and free from the catalogue rot and slop that's been eroding the benefits of streaming for a while now.

infomiho 18d ago

I had the same urge recently, I got tired of huge RAM use. It looks much less cool, but it suits my needs. Built a native Spotify player with Rust and GPUI: https://github.com/infomiho/cadence https://github.com/infomiho/cadence

mjaniczek 18d ago

I like the idea of a fast Spotify player, but I can't get over my doubts of LLM code quality when the audio playback stutters even with the 200ms output buffer setting (on macOS).

khernandezrt 18d ago

Other than having abysmal inconsistencies in their UI, ive never had any problems with the native Spotify app. I've been using Spotify for 10 years now and when im on my PC i open the app, either put my Podcast or song and then minimize it. Didnt know people had such issues with the app.

baggachipz 18d ago

Go easy on Spotify, they don't have much budget left after paying ungodly sums of money for exclusive contracts with nazi-enablers.

eonmatrix 18d ago

Cool project. Building it on Fedora is another story.

drooopy 18d ago

I find spotify to be more bloated now than iTunes was when apple pulled the plug on it.

deleted 18d ago

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jeffgreco 18d ago

This is cool. A few small thoughts: - would love to be able to disable podcasts / anything non music related. it's my #1 gripe with the official Spotify client today. - Winamp buttons shouldn't remain "pressed" in that play state - Winamp doesn't like being stuck to one edge of the screen, after putting there and interacting it will often jump inward a bit - Winamp could use the EQ in collapsed mode - Would be nice for Winamp to remember its position (i think it grabs the NW corner of the large player every time?

stan-ely 18d ago

Looks neat, i hope the librespot issues from the initial days don't come up here

harel 18d ago

This looks great, I'll give it a try. It seems like most of the comments focus on how this was created, whether it's vibe coded, agent engineered, LLM assisted or however you want to term this. On one hand, I am sad at the collapse of my craft. I love building things in code, figuring it out from the system design to the last compile. On the other hand, I love how productive I am now. How I can complete tasks faster. As someone mentioned, there is a very larger distance between "I vibed coded it and I don't know how it worked" to "I built it and I used LLMs to assist the process". It is possible to design a system, and instruct LLMs to write code for you. Task them the actual act of code writing, not feature development. It's not "build me a music player" but "I'm building a music player that works like so, and you will now write me the play button component that will behave like so and so, focusing on this or that, paying attention to x, y and z and avoiding a, b and c". Although the scope is different but I imagine a similar debate when one didn't need to write machine code anymore...

alejoar 18d ago

Doesn't appear to find Nest speakers :( I'd use it otherwise, this is great.

braggerxyz 18d ago

I use Strawberry as my music player on Linux, which is a native Qt app and has Spotify integration. No need for the spotify app. Strawberry has great collection support as I own thousands of ripped CDs.

mdnahas 18d ago
I just looked at Strawberry. Spotify is done via a GStreamer plug-in. It looks like you have to compile it yourself.

DressOrc 18d ago

oh wow, Ive been waiting for this for years, its insane we run entire browsers just to play music. Very excited to try this out

j1elo 18d ago

I've been using Slint as UI toolkit for Rust and so far liked it, coming as I am from the Qt/QML world. However, at the beginning I had to choose between Slint[1] and egui[2] (which this project uses) [1]: https://slint.dev/ https://slint.dev/ [2]: https://www.egui.rs/ https://www.egui.rs/ Anyone has experience in both and is able to drop some thoughts on their strengths & weaknesses for mid-to-large projects?

bilekas 18d ago

My worry with this, like all Spotify clients really, is its dependance on Spotify's, quite litteraly, worst public facing API that is known to exist. I have been using Spotatui and it's been fast enough, but it would be nice sometimes to have a better 'new music' search experience. I'll give this a try, but if Spotify are hell bent on destroying API users, I fear the project maintainers will have more work than it's worth.

qgin 18d ago

Not helpful for Linux users, but FYI both the Windows and Mac Apple Music clients are native apps.

kermatt 18d ago

I recently went through most of the Spotify clients I could find on GitHub, looking for something "lean", including screen real estate. Most of the GUI apps had something similar to the official app in the maximized window, but none had a good mini-player, something I could put in the corner of an external monitor and control most of the important functions with minimal mouse clicking, including EQ and playlist. Interestingly this one with its Winamp mode is what I was looking for. Nostaliga is probably playing a part, but it a good UI does not have to be "modern". I also went through a tour of TUI apps. Lots of interesting work there, but a full TUI with windows was less convenient to navigate, and some of them try to do too much. I wound up using https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot https://github.com/hrkfdn/ncspot because it specifically does not attempt to be a character mode GUI. Almost like a ViMusic.

hndqbrg2uk 18d ago

Nice to see fastpotify framed this way — I'd been circling the same idea without the right words.

Dansvidania 18d ago

I would welcome a mobile counterpart to this, if it is even possible. The iOS app is even worse.

poody 17d ago

I use youtube music.. It has everything I listen to and more.. Want an obscure college band (Go ZURCHER) ? .. It is there! Want some rare DnB (source direct).. It is there? Want a curated ambient collection? It is there! UX is totally fine on Apple and Android..

exp1orer 17d ago
I tried switching from Spotify to Youtube Music but the "download for offline" functionality is incredibly broken -- often doesn't recognize that it's on wifi to start downloading, multiple minutes to download an album that Spotify downloads in a few seconds, and for a longer playlist the pause/resume when you go off wifi doesn't work at all.

phusion 17d ago

Took a very long time to get it to sign in and play on my local machine... we'll see if it's worth switching from the official client.

dj24 17d ago

It uses 495mb on my machine, slightly false claims

legohead 17d ago

If this player has true random playing of your songs, instant sell for me. Also, a mobile version would be great, even if I have to do a manual install. Spotify's "random shuffle" has been broken for years, with a long running thread [1] complaining about it. A lot of the commenters think there is some kind of "artist priority" playing algorithm, with some kind of maximum profit goal or something. But I think it's simpler - if Spotify just plays the same ~20 songs, they save a lot on bandwidth as it can just play from a local store. Who knows the real reason, I just know that it's annoying when I have a 2000+ song playlist and only hear a small percentage of it. And yes I'm aware last year Spotify announced "fewer repeats" shuffle - but it doesn't work, or isn't sufficient anyway. [1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platforms-Option-to-have-a-true-shuffle/idi-p/4880594#comments https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/All-Platf...

HDThoreaun 17d ago
The most sickening part of this is that it isn’t actually broken, it’s working exactly how Spotify wants. Spotify thinks we are so stupid we actually want their janky “shuffle” that doesn’t work properly.

skarz 17d ago

But can my daughter, who has a Managed Account, use this?

flyingshelf 17d ago

I never understood the complaints about Spotify. Apple Music behaved like crap with something as simple as being offline, to me it's always been a no-brainer to use Spotify over anything else.

pqdbr 17d ago

Carmine is cooking. His work on RubyLLM has been incredible, even going as far as upstreaming important work about fiber usage into Rails Solid Queue so that we reap the Async benefits, which are essential in this LLM age.

christosk92 17d ago

I think it's cool people are making custom clients. I actually am working on my own client: WaveeMusic (https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic https://github.com/christosk92/WaveeMusic). I decided not to base it on librespot because it still talks to Spotify's old AP audiokey channel. Official clients don't use that path anymore, it already refuses accounts created after ~2023, and Spotify can turn it off whenever they want. I decided to use the new PlayPlay instead, the DRM path the official apps actually use. That also gets you music videos, and lossless / FLAC (still working on the decode). Also the app is more focused on the native Win11 niche for the folks who like those type of UIs.

internet_points 17d ago

I'm using Qobuz now, they have both downloads and streaming, and apparently pay the artist more than any of the other streaming alternatives. I've found all the music I've looked for there too (including some artists that dropped Spotify). Quite happy with everything except maybe the name ..

maxrev17 17d ago

These apps and systems have hard quirks built in to make you learn them then find the alternatives jarring so you don’t switch. It’s a retention trick by engineers who know what they’re doing. As many pointed out decent music player/library ux was solved yonks ago.

ergocoder 17d ago

I've stopped using Spotify for 2 years now. What I've realized is that Spotify is great for discovering new songs. But I'm a grown up and listen to the same hundreds of songs every day anyway. No need to keep paying the taxes.

actinium226 17d ago

I don't really get the comments about Spotify having a terrible UX, works fine for me. It uses 300 MB of RAM on my MacBook. Saving 50MB of RAM in exchange for losing the ability to play lossless files isn't a trade I want to make. Cool project though, will keep an eye on it.

ICHx 17d ago

Time to leave electron amid the ram crisis

mansilladev 17d ago

For me, stock Spotify client on Mac is using ~200MB RAM (no videos / canvas). I probably need to try a leaner build on Fastspotify (built it myself from source), bug the damn thing was using ~350MB RAM. Both RAM counts were based on initial load + playing one song.

boguscoder 17d ago
have you summed up all the Spotify Helper processes from Chrome? alas its way beyond 200MB. But I just built and ran release build of fastpotify and its also hovering in 500s

mayli 17d ago

> It starts in well under a second and typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM. Hmm, a music player now use much RAM :/

rickreynoldssf 17d ago

To give you an idea of the kinds of Engineering decisions going on at Spotify, they do thousands of deploys per day and are PROUD of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-E24t0YM2g Must be one of THE WORST engineering orgs running right now.

rubymamis 17d ago

Like this, but the problem with such immediate mode GUI apps is that they constantly burn 1-2% of CPU when the app is idle. A waste of compute and power.

paaloeye 17d ago

Saw it's Rust, closed immediately.

tarwin 17d ago

If you want this experience but don't want Spotify may I suggest my "amp" app - you can get it on tinyjs.app It's small ~10mb. Yes, takes a bit more memory, but it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want! And includes a bunch of viz - and you can write your own too. It doesn't do Winamp skins; decided I wanted to add more than they could support.

arnefm 17d ago

Suddenly I couldn't resolve fastpotify.rocks in DNS. Quad9 is now blocking this domain for some reason. https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester https://quad9.net/result/?url=fastpotify.rocks#domain-tester ThreatStop lists the following info: Severity Level: 5 of 5 Confidence Level: 5 of 5 Risk Level: 4 of 5 I assume this is a false positive, but who can be sure in this day and age...

stronglikedan 17d ago

Unfortunately this won't fix the atrocious recommendation system. I really wish these music services could just license Pandora's system. Since Pandora won't add high quality streams, they may as well offer a license to make up for the money they leave on the table monthly. The most user hostile part about Spotify though, is that you can't just thumbs down a song and never hear it again. Why the fuck would I want you to "not recommend it for 30 days" if I'm telling you I dislike it? If I didn't lock in a bundle deal years ago that I still can't pass up, I wouldn't use it at all. As of now though, it's relegated to my backup player for when I can't find a song on YT Music or Qobuz.