If Spotify is the king of streaming music services it is for at least two reasons: the first, that it has existed since 2008; the second, which offers a free option with ads. Those ads… well, they're annoying, but it's the alternative price you have to pay. There are ways to avoid hearing these ads, but putting our account at risk if the company decides to take action. A sure way not to suffer from these ads is thanks to Spottube, and we explain how and why.
Spotube is a mixture of the names "Spotify", the streaming music service, with "YouTube", Google's famous video service. The way it works is as follows: we identify ourselves with our Spotify account, more or less, as we will explain later, and the application plays music from Sopotify and YouTube without ads and cutting, if we ask, the part of the videos that are not of the songs themselves.
Spotube uses our Spotify account and library
Our Spotify account is not in any danger because it is only used to consult our library, recommendations and so on, and it would be more or less like one of those alternative frontends. Spotube allows us to like, add to lists, this on Spotify, and download the songs, this from YouTube. The audio quality is that offered by YouTube or Spotify Free, and is not very different from that of YouTube Music.
The application itself, or rather, its interface is simple and intuitive. When music is playing, below we see the play bar with the controls for shuffle, back, play/pause, forward and repeat. On the left side there is an image of the song we are playing (or its disk), and on the right, in addition to the volume slider:
- Option to see the lyrics. We can see them normally or synchronized, and it even allows you to advance or delay the texts so that they coincide well.
- Alternative sources. If a song is not what we expected, we can enter this option to find something better.
- Discharge. This will download the song in the quality that YouTube offers.
- Mark as we like.
- Timer to stop at a certain time.
- Mini-player, which usually fits more into a full-screen maxi-player. We can make it "mini" by changing the size of the window.
On the left we see the account in which we have connected and we can enter the options, among which we choose things such as the language, the country of the store in which we want to connect, some of the design or the SponsorBlock, which is what It will skip ads and those pieces of audio that are not from a song itself.
Features
On its GitHub page we can see that it offers all this:
- No ads, thanks to the use of Spotify and YouTube public APIs.
- Track download.
- Multi platform.
- Light weight and less data usage.
- Anonymous or account identification.
- Synchronized lyrics.
- No telemetry, diagnostics or data collection.
- Native performance.
- Open source.
- Control playback locally, not on a server.
Some things to polish
Spotube works pretty well for general computing, but has things to polish. For example, it would be appreciated if it were compatible with the controls of different desktops, such as KDE. The app is not recognized as a music app in Plasma. As a programmer, I would say, junior, it never fails to amuse me that the albums start at song number 0, which is the first coincidence in all the programming languages I have seen.
They are minor problems that will surely be fixed over time.
How to identify yourself on Spotube
The way to identify yourself on Spotube with a Spotify account is not the simplest and most direct in the world. A Spotify account will be used, but it does not work with a username and password. You have to follow these steps:
- In any browser, we will open.spotify.com and we identify ourselves.
- We open Spotube and click on “Connect with Spotify”.
- We will see a window with a kind of login, but, as we have said, the credentials are not username and password. What we need is the information from the “sp_dc” and “sp_key” cookies.
- If I can't explain myself in the best way, under the "Send" button there are precise instructions on how to do it by clicking on "Follow the step-by-step guide." There are even screenshots, so I don't think I need to add them too. But we will say the steps:
- We have already explained the first one, which is connecting to Spotify.
- From here, what we have to do will vary a little depending on the chosen browser. You have to go to the developer tools, generally with F12, and then to the Application section (in Chromium-based browsers) or Storage (in Firefox). There we will see the Cookies information.
- We look for cookies with names “sp_dc” and “sp_key”, copy what is in the “value” column and put them in the Spotube login.
And that would be all. Our Spotify account is already on Spotube, but it will only be used to sync data. I think this point is important because it doesn't do anything strange in Spotify, like some browser extension can do to eliminate ads.
How to install Spotube
Spotube is multi platform and can be installed on virtually any device that is not an iPhone/iPad. On its GitHub page there are links to download its EXE (Windows), DMG (macOS), there is a link to the Google Play, an APK or F-Droid (Android) and also to Flatub, its AppImage and its tarball, which would be the best option for me because it works for practically any Linux and I wouldn't have to explain anything else.
For different Linux distributions, it would be installed by opening a terminal and typing:
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install Spotube-linux-x86_64.deb
Arch/Manjaro (AUR)
With Pamac:
sudo pamac install spotube-bin
With yay:
yay -Sy spotube-bin
Fedora
sudo dnf install ./Spotube-linux-x86_64.rpm
OpenSuse
sudo zypper in ./Spotube-linux-x86_64.rpm
Spotube is a good way to listen to free music if 100% reliability and the best quality are not required.