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Play and visualize Spotify music in terminal with mopidy and ncmpcpp

Like Winamp, ncmpcpp is timeless classic for music applications. As I’ve picked up my work and slowly moved into the command-line space, I’ve found ncmpcpp very easy to use. Ncmpcpp is an mpd client and coupled with Mopidy I can browse Spotify playlists, search for artists, and play top tracks.

brew install ncmpcpp

My latest endeavor with managing my music on the CLI has been to use a visualizer like cli-visualizer or even ncmpcpp’s native visualization. It’s a fairly simple setup that’s been around for a while with a standard mpd and mpd client like ncmpcpp. However, to use an mpd client with a streaming service like Spotify or Soundcloud, you have to use a service like Mopidy.

Without Spotify

If you don’t stream music, you’re able to stick with a normal mpd setup.

brew install mpd

Using a Music Player Daemon to serve audio has been around for a while, so I won’t get into this. Make sure you setup the entire config correctly, however, I’ll highlight a key element here: the two audio outputs. The visualizers both in ncmpcpp and in cli-visualizer need the fifo audio output to work:

audio_output {
  type                  "fifo"
  name                  "my_fifo"
  path                  "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
  format                "44100:16:2"
}

And macOS uses CoreAudio for it’s sound hardware output, so we’ll add another output:

audio_output {
  type                  "osx"
  name                  "CoreAudio"
  mixer_type            "software"
}

With Spotify

Install Mopidy and Mopidy-Spotify. They have additional plugins for other streaming services.

brew install mopidy mopidy-spotify

Run mopidy once so the default config files are created. On macOS the config is ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf. Check out my config here. The key component I wrestled with here was the split audio output.

[audio]
output = tee name=t t. ! queue ! autoaudiosink t. ! queue ! audioresample ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw,rate=44100,channels=2,format=S16LE ! wavenc ! filesink location=/tmp/mpd.fifo

Using a tee gstreamer element, we’re able to use two audio outputs. Check out Mopidy’s documentation for advanced audio setups for more details.

You may have also noticed spotify_tunigo in the mopidy.conf below the Spotify options. Spotify Tunigo let’s you browser Spotify’s curated playlists and checkout new music.

Install Spotify Tunigo:

pip install Mopidy-Spotify-Tunigo

It’s also important to note the Spotify settings in mopidy.conf. Storing passwords in plaintext is bad. There’s a current work-around with python and an open issue to improve this. Of course, it’s always best practice to use unique passwords for everything.

Now let’s run mopidy to make sure you don’t get any errors. When I set up mine on macOS, I had a python error about a missing libspotify framework in /Library/Frameworks. If you get this error, simply run brew info libspotify to see where homebrew has installed your libspotify package. Create a folder in /Library/Frameworks called libspotify.framework, then create a symlink in /Library/Frameworks/libspotify.framework with:

ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/libspotify/12.1.51/lib/libspotify /Library/Frameworks/libspotify.framework/libspotify

Once you’ve confirmed there aren’t any runtime errors, you can now run mopidy as a service.

brew services start mopidy

Now let’s run ncmpcpp. Jump to the music browser with 2 and pick some Spotify tracks to play on the current playlist queue. 8 will take you to ncmpcpp’s visualizer. If you’ve install cli-visualizer you can run it with vis. Here are some of my preferred settings in ./config/vis/config:

visualizer.spectrum.top.margin=0.30
audio.stereo.enabled=false

Some problems I’m working through with this setup: I noticed that when I change tracks or pause/stop and then resume playback in ncmpcpp, the cli-visualizer won’t resume animation.

My next task is to get the cli-visualizer output to work on my mac’s desktop as an Ubersicht widget.

musiccli