Spotify, native and fast. A lightweight Spotify client written in Rust with egui, playing music through librespot. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, starts in well under a second, and stays small while it runs. There is no browser engine anywhere in the process.

Fastpotify follows in the footsteps of Omarchy Spotify and spotify-tui: the familiar Spotify layout, the whole library, and a Spotify Connect receiver on your computer, as one ordinary desktop application rather than a shell plugin.

Documentation: fastpotify.rocks: what it is, getting started, everyday use, and how it connects to Spotify.

• Plays music on this computer. Fastpotify is a Spotify Connect device. Pick it from your phone, or press play here. Gapless, up to 320 kbps, with optional volume normalisation and an on-disk audio cache.
• Controls every other device. Move playback to a speaker, a phone, or another computer from the device picker, and keep controlling it: play, pause, skip, seek, shuffle, repeat, volume.
• Finds speakers on your network. A librespot, spotifyd, or hardware receiver waiting on the LAN is invisible to Spotify's API until it has an account. Fastpotify discovers those over mDNS and connects them for you, after which they behave like any other Spotify Connect device.
• Your whole library. Playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, and saved episodes, filterable in the sidebar and as full pages.
• Search across songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes, with a top result and per-type views.
• Home with Made for you, Recently played, your top artists and songs, and recommendations.
• Artist pages with popular songs, a filterable discography, and related artists. Album, playlist, and podcast pages with everything playable from any row.
• Playlists you own can be created, renamed, described, reordered, and edited: add from any row's menu, remove from the playlist page.
• Queue as a side panel or a page; add anything to it from a row menu.
• Album-art colour. Pages and the player bar take a tint from the cover of what you are looking at or listening to. Turn it off in Settings.
• Light and dark, or follow the system.
• Keyboard-first. Every common action has a shortcut (Ctrl+/ lists them).
• Keeps playing when you close the window. The window closes for real, the music and the process stay in the system tray (Linux status notifier), and clicking the tray, or your desktop's media controls, brings a window back. No compositor-specific tricks, so it behaves the same on any desktop. Quit from the tray menu or Ctrl+Q; turn the behaviour off in Settings if you prefer close-to-quit.
• Honest about the network. Pages show spinners while they load, a quiet indicator appears in the top bar whenever the app is talking to Spotify for more than a moment, and if Spotify asks the app to back off you see that it is waiting, instead of an unexplained pause.
• One instance. Launching it again surfaces the window that is already open instead of starting a rival copy, on every platform.
• Desktop integration. MPRIS on Linux, so media keys, the shell, and playerctl see Fastpotify like any other player.

On Arch Linux, Fastpotify is in the AUR:

yay -S fastpotify          # the released build
yay -S fastpotify-git      # built from the latest commit

On macOS, with Homebrew:

brew install --cask crmne/tap/fastpotify

Everywhere else it is a single binary. Build it with a stable Rust toolchain (1.95 or newer):

cargo install --path .

On Linux you also need the development packages for ALSA, PulseAudio (which covers PipeWire), and the usual windowing libraries, for example on Arch:

sudo pacman -S --needed alsa-lib libpulse libxkbcommon wayland

and on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev

With Nix, nix develop provides all of it, along with the exact toolchain rust-toolchain.toml pins.

Titles in a script the interface font does not cover -- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, the Indic scripts and a dozen more -- are drawn with a face borrowed from the system rather than bundled, which would cost more than ten megabytes for Chinese alone. macOS and Windows carry faces for the common ones; on Linux install the Noto families for the scripts you listen to, for example noto-fonts and noto-fonts-cjk (Arch) or fonts-noto and fonts-noto-cjk (Debian or Ubuntu). A script with no face installed still shows as empty boxes.

A desktop entry is provided in packaging/applications/fastpotify.desktop.

Press Sign in with Spotify. Your browser opens Spotify's own consent page (Authorization Code with PKCE); Fastpotify never sees your password. When Spotify redirects back to the app, your library, search, and control of other devices work immediately. The refresh token is stored in the platform's state directory (~/.local/state/fastpotify on Linux), so the browser is needed once per machine.

Playing music on this computer is one more one-time browser approval. Spotify treats streaming as a separate grant for its own client identity, which is what librespot plays with. Take it from the device menu ("Play here, set up once") or Settings; it needs Spotify Premium, and librespot stores a reusable credential so it also never asks again. Browsing and remote control work on any account without this step.

By default the Web API uses the shared public application also used by spotify-player, ncspot, and Omarchy Spotify. If you hit rate limits you can register your own (free) Spotify application and paste its Client ID in Settings → Account.

On macOS, Cmd replaces Ctrl.

Everything lives in one readable JSON file (~/.config/fastpotify/settings.json on Linux): the Connect device name, bitrate, normalisation, autoplay, gapless playback, the audio backend (PulseAudio/PipeWire or ALSA on Linux), audio cache size, theme, and whether pages take colour from artwork. Playback settings apply when you press Apply and restart playback.

Caches (audio, artwork) live under the cache directory and can be deleted at any time without signing you out.

• src/player.rs: the librespot session, player, mixer, and Spirc (Spotify Connect) wrapped into one engine that folds player events into a state snapshot for the interface.
• src/api/: a small Web API client with bounded concurrency, Retry-After handling, and automatic fallback between the 2026 endpoint shapes (/me/library, /playlists/{id}/items) and the classic ones.
• src/backend.rs: a tokio runtime on its own thread; the interface talks to it through channels and is woken with request_repaint, so the app is idle when nothing happens.
• src/images.rs: album art as an egui bytes loader with a disk cache and time-based eviction, plus the accent-colour extraction.
• src/app.rs, src/model.rs, src/ui/: state, navigation, and the views. Views collect Actions while drawing and the app applies them afterwards.
• src/mpris.rs: Linux media controls on a dedicated thread.

Fastpotify pins its Rust toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml; cargo test covers the API models, the endpoint fallbacks, PKCE, the player state machine, and a headless render of every page, panel, and dialog.

To look at the interface without a Spotify account, build with the demo feature and start it with sample data:

cargo run --features demo -- --demo --demo-page playlist:pl1 --demo-show queue

Demo mode never writes settings. --demo-shot <PATH> writes the window to a PNG and exits, which is how the screenshot above is made.

Fastpotify stands on librespot, egui, the Inter typeface (OFL), and Lucide icons (ISC).

Fastpotify is an independent project and is not affiliated with Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

Licensed under the MIT License.