What is Spotifast?
Why Spotifast
Spotify, native and fast. Spotifast is a Spotify client written in Rust with egui. It plays music through librespot. It typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM, while Spotify’s desktop app often uses 600 MB to over 1 GB. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, starts in well under a second, and has no browser engine.
How to say it: “spot-ee-fast,” written as one word.
Spotifast was previously called Fastpotify. Existing settings, sign-ins,
playlists and upgrade paths carry over. The rename is on main; the current
0.7.1 download still uses the previous name.
Playback needs Spotify Premium. Free accounts can browse and search, but cannot play music through Spotifast on this computer or another device.
What it does
- Plays music on this computer. Spotifast appears as a Spotify Connect device. Select it from your phone or play music in the app. Playback is gapless and supports up to 320 kbps, with optional volume normalisation and an on-disk audio cache.
- Controls other devices. 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.
- Library. Browse playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, and saved episodes. Create, edit, and reorder your playlists.
- Search across songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes, with artist pages, discographies, and related artists.
- Background playback. Closing the window keeps the music playing from
the system tray. On Linux, MPRIS supports media keys and
playerctl. - Themes. Use light, dark, or system mode. Pages can take a colour from album art.
What it does not do
Spotifast has a limited scope:
- Playing needs Spotify Premium, on this computer (as with every librespot-based client) and on other devices too, because Spotify’s API only takes playback commands from Premium accounts. Browsing and search work on any account, and Spotifast says so when a Free account signs in.
- Setup has two sign-ins because Spotify authorizes Web API and streaming access separately. How it connects explains why.
- Local playback tops out at 320 kbps. Spotify protects its lossless streams with DRM that librespot does not support, and Spotifast will not circumvent it. This can change if lawful support lands upstream.
- No video podcasts or social features.
- Spotifast is an unofficial client built on Spotify’s public Web API and librespot. Spotify changes these from time to time; when they do, features can break until the client catches up.
Bug reports should include fastpotify.log, panic.log after a crash, and
steps to reproduce the problem. See the
issue form.
Account safety
We are not aware of a Spotify account being suspended for using Spotifast or another librespot player with Premium. Sign-in happens on Spotify’s own pages, audio uses the quality included with Premium, DRM stays intact, and Spotifast does not rip tracks or block ads.
Reported suspensions usually involve modded apps that remove ads from free accounts, track ripping, or stream manipulation. Spotifast does none of those things, and its contribution rules prohibit them.
Prior art
Spotifast uses librespot for Spotify playback. It takes inspiration from spotify-tui, spotify-player, ncspot, and Omarchy Spotify.
Spotifast is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Spotify AB. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.