Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Spotify server

In this tutorial we will install Mopidy on our Raspberry Pi. This will allow us to use the Pi

as a music server where we can access all of our local music files, as well as playlists from

e.g. Spotify, and stream it directly to our TV or speaker system.

What is Mopidy?

Mopidy is a music server that can play music from a wide variety of sources, like your local

hard drive, radio streams, Spotify, and SoundCloud. The nice thing about Mopidy is that it

collects all of your music sources in one place. This makes it a perfect match for our

Raspberry Pi.

Another cool feature is that when you search your library, it combines results from all

music sources, and you can mix tracks from all sources in your play queue. That includes

your playlists from e.g. Spotify, SoundCloud, or other available sources.

To control your Mopidy music server, you can use a wide variety of web clients, the

Ubuntu Sound Menu, any device on the same network which can control UPnP

MediaRenderers, or any MPD client.

There are MPD clients available for many platforms, including Windows, OSX, Linux,

Android and iOS. We will look into some of these in the end of this article.

Using these clients, Mopidy allows you to control your music from any device. And if you

make your Pi accessible from outside the LAN, you can literally control your music from

anywhere in the world!

Installation

0. Add needed modules

As a first step we need to activate some modules to avoid potential problems during the

installation. First, run the following command to activate ipv6:

sudo modprobe ipv6

Now open /etc/modules and add this to make sure modules are loaded on reboot:

snd-bcm2835

bcm2708_wdog

ipv6

1. Add the archives GPG key

Run the following command to add Mopidys GPG key:

wget -q -O - http://apt.mopidy.com/mopidy.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

2. Modify your sources.list

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list, or if you have

the directory/etc/apt/sources.list.d/, add it to a file called mopidy.list in that

directory:

# Mopidy APT archive

deb http://apt.mopidy.com/ stable main contrib non-free

deb-src http://apt.mopidy.com/ stable main contrib non-free

3. Install Mopidy and all dependencies:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install mopidy

4. Create the Mopidy config file

Now that we have installed Mopidy, its time to make some modifications to its config file. Right now we dont have a config file, and we can either create on manually, or let Mopidy generate one for us that will contain all the default values. We are not stupid, so lets do the latter.

In order to have Mopidy create the config file for us, we simply have to start Mopidy. If it

cannot find a config file, it will create a new one at startup. The file will be created in

~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf.

Run Mopidy:

mopidy

and you should see something like this:

INFO Starting Mopidy 0.18.3

INFO Loading config from: builtin defaults, /etc/xdg/mopidy/mopidy.conf,

/home/pi/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf, command line options

INFO Enabled extensions: mpd, http, stream

INFO Disabled extensions: local

WARNING Found local configuration errors, the extension has been

automatically disabled:

WARNING local/media_dir must be set.

WARNING Please fix the extension configuration errors or disable the

extensions to silence these messages.

INFO Starting Mopidy audio

INFO Starting Mopidy backends: StreamBackend

INFO Audio output set to "autoaudiosink"

INFO Audio mixer is using software mixing

INFO Starting Mopidy core

INFO Starting Mopidy frontends: HttpFrontend, MpdFrontend

INFO MPD server running at [::ffff:127.0.0.1]:6600

INFO HTTP server running at http://127.0.0.1:6680

Stop the server with Ctrl-C.

Now we have the configuration file in place. If you want to, you can take a look at it to see

how the default settings are. We will edit a few things later on.

6. Restart the system

Now we need to restart the system to make sure all the new modules and dependencies are

working correctly:

sudo reboot

A very important note for RaspBMC users. Due to a dependency version problem that is

caused when installing Mopidy, you might have to make some minor configurations for

XBMC to start properly (this depends on your systems version).

If you notice that XBMC is not starting but gets stuck in a loop, you need to make these

configurations. In short, what you have to do is the following:

Run the following command, and it should stop the loop and start up as normal:

sudo ln -sf /home/pi/.xbmc-current/xbmc-bin/lib/xbmc/system/libtag.so.1

/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libtag.so.1

Then you need to open /etc/rc.local and add the command to the end of the file to make

it persistent on reboot. Now it will not complain anymore when you restart your system.

You can read more about it in this post.

7. Audio output

Once you have restarted the system, we can start making some changes to our settings.

By default the audio will output to HDMI, and if you want to change that we need to

change this value in the amixer settings:

sudo amixer cset numid=3 1

The 1 in the end indicates that we want the audio to output to analog. Other options for this value are:

0=auto

1=analog

2=HDMI

You can test these settings by running:

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

and you should hear a voice saying front center.

8. Install Spotify extension

After all the basic settings for Mopidy are in place, we can install the Spotify extension.

This will allow Mopidy to connect to Spotify with your account and fetch all your playlists.

Run the following command to install the extension:

sudo apt-get install mopidy-spotify

9. Edit the Mopidy conf

Now its time to make some modifications to the config file. Lets open

the ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf file again so we can add a few things.

Under the section [ audio], we need to change the output value:

[ audio]

...

output = alsasink

...

Remember to remove the # from the beginning of the line. You can leave all the other values as they are.

We also have to add a new section for the Spotify extension. Add the following anywhere

in the file:

[spotify]

username = yourusername

password = yourpassword

Next we will prepare Mopidy to accept client connections. Under the section [mpd], change

hostname to :: and set a password:

[mpd]

...

hostname = ::

password = yourpassword

...

The change in hostname makes it possible for us to connect to Mopidy from any IP

address, and not only from the Pi itself.

Leave the rest as default.

When you have done this we must restart Mopidy in order for it to load the new settings:

sudo pkill mopidy

mopidy

Now you can see that Mopidy is also loading the Spotify extension, and you should also see

that its loading all of your Spotify playlists.

Clients

Now that weve installed Mopidy, we can start playing around with different clients we want to use to connect to it. At this point you can connect any MPD client to Mopidy and

control your music. There are a few you can choose from, and the official Mopidy site lists

a few they recommend.

MPD Client

We have already prepared Mopidy to accept connections from MPD clients, so lets start with that.

If you have an Android phone, you can download MPDroid from here.

iPhone users can download MPoD from here.

In order to connect to your Mopidy server, make sure that your phone is connected to the

LAN and simply input the IP of the Pi along with the password you set for the mpd

connection in the Mopidy config.

Web client

You might want the option to connect to Mopidy through a web client, so lets set that up as well. This means anybody can access it from a browser, which is nice if you have friends

over and they want to search for a song from their phone or laptop.

There are a few HTTP clients for Mopidy that work really great. We will install Mopidy-

Webclient by woutervanwijk, but you can use anyone youd like.

Lets get the client:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/webclient

wget https://github.com/woutervanwijk/Mopidy-Webclient/archive/master.zip

unzip master.zip

sudo mv Mopidy-Webclient-master/flatclient/ /opt/webclient/

If you have problems getting the zip file due to an error like: ERROR: The certificate of `github.com' is not trusted.

Add the --no-check-certificate flag to the wget command

Now we need to edit the Mopidy config file:

vim .config/mopidy/mopidy.conf

Find the [http] section, and edit it to look like this:

[http]

enabled = true

hostname = ::

port = 6680

static_dir = /opt/webclient/flatclient

Restart Mopidy:

pkill mopidy

mopidy

Now you are able to connect to Mopidy through your browser. Simply enter the IP of you

Pi, and the port as specified in the config file (6680), e.g. http://192.168.0.93:6680/

This was a rather long tutorial, but hopefully it was worth it. Dont forget to share it if you liked it, and drop a comment if you have any question or need help with anything!