Fastpotify: A native Spotify client that boots in under a second and turns into Winamp

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?

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.

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

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

̶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.

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.

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

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!

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/

The demos are very good: 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.

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.

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