spotymenu

spotymenu is a bash script which uses dmenu, dbus and the Spotify web API to control Spotify. It uses local files to store information so you don't need a premium account or a token to use it.

Why?

Because Spotify's GUI is slow, and if you have a lots of albums, it's pain in the ass to view & select from them.

dmenu is fast and convenient way to access them.

What you can do with spotymenu:

• add albums to the local album list (file)
• remove albums from the local album list (file)
• select and play albums from the local album list (file)
• add tracks to a "favorites" list (file)
• search for albums/artists/tracks
• log your searches to a search history (file) and reuse them quickly
• get the tracklist of the playing album and cache it locally
• show the currently playing song
• get some info (metadata) about the currently playing song
• you can customize it to your liking (colors, font, separator line etc.)

What you CAN'T do:

• spotymenu doesn't use tokens, it won't sync to your Spotify account, and it won't modify it at any level.
• It doesn't use libspotify or any premium-only solution, so you can't use it without the GUI.
• No play/pause, prev/next integration (via dbus). This should be managed with key combos / hotkeys, you might already have taken care of these anyway.

Screenshots

Album list

Tracklist

Delete album

Dependencies

• dmenu or dmenu2
• jq
• Spotify with dbus support

Setting up

Installation (Arch Linux)

Clone this repo, change to the cloned directory and run makepkg -si. If you are using dmenu2 instead of dmenu, don't forget to change its name in the depends array in the PKGBUILD:

from: depends=('spotify' 'dmenu' 'jq')

to: depends=('spotify' 'dmenu2' 'jq')

Then create the necessary directories in your HOME directory:

mkdir -p ~/.spotymenu/tracklist_cache

After that you might want to copy the default configuration file (spotymenurc) to your .config directory:

cp -R /etc/spotymenu ~/.config

The config file has comments, read them and set it up the way you like.

Optional Dependency:

• fzf (Arch Community repo , github ): for running spotymenu from TTY/tmux without switching back to X (Note: not fully working: you can list/select/play albums, but other options don't seem to work.)

Installation (manually)

By default spotymenu resides in ~/.spotymenu. You can change it in the configuration file.

Put the spotymenu script somewhere in you $PATH, e.g.: /usr/bin.

Put the configuration file (spotymenurc) inside /etc and/or inside ~/.config/spotymenu.

Then create the necessary directories in your HOME directory:

mkdir -p ~/.spotymenu/tracklist_cache

The config file has comments, read them and set it up the way you like.

Optional Dependency:

• fzf (github ): for running spotymenu from TTY/tmux without switching back to X (Note: not fully working: you can list/select/play albums, but other options don't seem to work.)

Exporting Spotify album list

If you have a lots of albums, it's better to export it to a local album list. You can export your albums with this script: spotify-album-export. You need a token for this, which you can get it from here. (Log in, Get a token, check the read-user-library option. The token will expire after a certain amount of time).

Then run the spotify-album-export <token> which will export your first 50 albums. If you have more, then you can run the script again with the -o option, which is the offset, so the command would be: spotify-album-export -o 50 <token>. If you still have more, run again with -o 100 and so on...

By default it will save the album list to this file: ~/album_list (Put it to spotymenu's directory).

It's a pipe delimited file, which stores basic infromation about the albums:

artist|album_title|album_id

One per line!

Exporting Spotify playlists

Keep in mind, spotymenu doesn't use a token so it can't access to your playlists and it won't autoplay them either after you select one from spotymenu. The playlist feature is rather a "bookmark" or "quick link" to your Spotify playlists.

No export script from me yet, you might need to use something else or export them manually: right click on the playlist in Spotify, copy the Spotify URI and paste it to ~/.spotymenu/playlists (by default). It needs to be a pipe delimited file too:

playlist_name|spotify_uri

One per line!

Then you can access this list from spotymenu with the :p or :playlist command (see the Usage section below!).

Usage

You can run it from dmenu but it's faster to bind the spotymenu command to some hotkey.

There is a little help page inside spotymenu, you can get this by using the :h or :help command.

It will look like this:

/                   Search track (with or without artist)

/a   /artist        Search artist

/b   /album         Search album

:?                  Show search history

:p   :playlist      Switch to the exported playlists

:a   :add           Add current album to the album list

:d   :delete        Delete album from the album list

:t   :tracklist     Show tracklist of the current album

:f   :fav           Show favorite tracks' list

:fa  :fadd          Add track to the favorites list

:fd  :fdel          Delete track from the favorites list

:i   :info          Show detailed information about the played track/album

:q   :quit          Quit (close Spotify)

:c   :clean         Cleanup the unused tracklist cache files (IDs that are not in the album list)

spotify:album:<id>  Open album by pasting the album URI from clipboard (Ctrl-Y or Ctrl-y by default in dmenu)

spotify:track:<id>  Open track by pasting the track URI from clipboard (Ctrl-Y or Ctrl-y by default in dmenu)

:h   :help          This help

Some simple example:

• search for Metallica: /a Metallica
• search for the Master of Puppets album: /b master of puppets
• search for a track (song): /metallica one

License

• MIT Copyright (c) 2016 spcmd