Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming allowing users to listen to specific tracks or albums on-demand.
Despite launching clients for Android, Symbian and iPhone OS, an officially supported Squeezebox Server (formerely SqueezeCentre) client for Spotify hasn’t yet been unveiled. Until somebody gets their Perl boots on and creates one, I’ve created a short tutorial demonstrating how to stream audio from Spotify on your PC to your Squeezeboxes. It works by utilising DirectSound Bridge, a small wrapper which exposes the playing stream as an MP3, which can be received by your Squeezebox.
It really is pretty simple. To start, you’ll need to download two files to your PC:
Next, you'll need to:
- Close the Spotify application if it is currently running. On Windows 7, you might have to launch the Task Manager and end the process.
- Open the Lame MP3 Encoder archive you just downloaded and locate the file “lame_enc.dll” and copy it to the Spotify directory on your local PC (e.g. C:\Program Files\Spotify)
- Open the DSBridge archive and copy “DSound.dll” and “DSBridge.ini” to your the same folder.
Open Spotify as normal and start a track playing. It’s best you turn the volume down as your PC will only be used as a controller for streaming to your Squeezeboxes. You might notice a new icon in your system tray. It’ll be blue when idle and green when streaming music.
You’re done. Now, you just need to tune in your stream from your Squeeze Centre web control panel, in effect creating the bridge between Squeeze Centre and Spotify.
Do this by entering your Squeeze Centre address into the address bar (mine is http://10.2.1.81:9000/)
Locate Internet Radio / Tune In URL on the web interface and enter the address of the PC running Spotify. In my case it was http://10.2.1.100:8124
Tip: If you don’t know the address, go to your PC and press WINDOWS+R, type CMD and enter which will display a command prompt window. Now enter ipconfig and press enter again. The IP address will be displayed.
