ncspot For Linux

There are a plethora of reasons to love Spotify, and it's really no surprise that the audio streaming and media services provider is still at the top of its game and leading the pack even after more than 15 years since it was created.

After a somewhat rocky start, Spotify is now available on Linux. However, the client might not work perfectly on all distributions out there. Thankfully, there are multiple third-party, unofficial Spotify clients to choose from.

ncspot is one Spotify client that is a bit different from most other offerings.

ncspot is a ncurses Spotify client, it's fully written in Rust, and uses the librespot library. For those of you who are familiar with ncurses, you already know what to expect from this app.

Those who are not very familiar with ncurses (new curses), just know that it's a programming library that provides an API that allows programmers to write text-based interfaces (TUIs) in a terminal-independent manner.

The app is massively inspired by ncmpc, one of the best MPD ncurses clients out there. Ok, so what does this mean? To put it simply, it means that you should expect an app that doesn't have a typical GUI, but uses a TUI (just like a shell or the Terminal, for instance).

The first and most important thing to know about this app is that it doesn't work with free Spotify accounts. This means that you'll have to have a valid subscription to Spotify Premium in order to use it.

ncspot should automatically prompt for a Spotify username and password on the first launch. The process also generates an OAuth token and stores the information on your computer's system.

ncspot can run various audio backends. By default, the app uses the PulseAudio backend, but you can also make it use the PortAudio backend (for BSD distros), but it does require you to build the app from source yourself.

Other features include the ability to configure a plethora of keybindings, as well as adding a screen that displays the album art, controlling the app via dbus, sending notifications with what's playing, and copying the URL of a song/playlist to your computer's clipboard.

ncspot is a fun and interesting, little Spotify client. Thanks to its unique approach, it definitely won't be the most popular Spotify client of our generation.

Nevertheless, there's no denying that MPD client lovers will adore it, and also there's no denying the fact that it's remarkably lightweight, as it should since it doesn't have a typical GUI.