Posts for 2023 December
Fix Spotify deeplinking in Linux + custom SpotiWeb UI
Post by Nico Brailovsky @ 2023-12-16 | Permalink | Leave a comment
After a recent update I found my custom Spotify UI (*) wasn't working. The way my custom UI works is by generating a simple list of followed artists, and then playing in the native app by using deep-linking. A recent update seems to have broken this in Linux based OSes, so here's my fix:
sudo mv /usr/share/spotify/spotify /usr/share/spotify/spotify.real
sudo echo '/usr/share/spotify/spotify.real --uri="$1"' > /usr/share/spotify/spotify
Seems old versions of spotify would try to open anything as a deeplink, but new versions require a --uri parameter on argv. Surely there is a cleaner way of doing this in xdg-open, but I'm too lazy to read manuals.
In the "reminder to myself" category, as there is zero chance I'll remember this next time I'm setting up a computer.
(*) SpotiWeb: custom Spotify UI
I don't like "recent" changes (recent being the last 3 or 4 years!) to Spotify's UI, so I rolled out my own. It's a plain, boring, unobtrusive view of all your followed artists, grouped by categories. It also runs in any browser and is extremely minimalist (doesn't even have a search function: you can use the browser's search if you need one!)
The app is hosted in github pages, and because it's entirely client side it doesn't need any kind of server side support to run. Check out the source here and either run your own, or check out there's no server side processing involved.