Listen to Spotify and Radio Helsinki from a Raspberry Pi

I describe how I build the Zynthian Raspberry Pi OS synthesizer from a kit in a previous blog post. It sits mostly idle connected to my sound card, so I decided to make it a bit more useful while it is idling.

The first goal was to make it play Radio Helsinki, one of my most played online radio stations. That's simple enough; I just created a systemd service which connects to the stream using mplayer.

Note that I'm using jackaudio as an audio "sink." The synthesizer is thus perfectly playable, even if I am listening to something else meanwhile.

I get soon bored listening to only one channel. The next step is then to add Spotify. There is a pre-made debian package called raspotify, but alas, the bundled librespot Spotify client does not work with the jackaudio backend. I decided that the most comfortable choice is to compile librespot in the Raspberry Pi and then create a systemd service (after all, that is pretty much all raspotify does).

The Spotify client service is quite simple to run.

I added a script that listens to the client's events to start/stop Radio Helsinki service accordingly. The music never stops!

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