Linux Desktop notifications

[yorgosv]

After the latest update on Linux (version 0.9.10.17) every played song creates a desktop notification, which on KDE results into a distracting background popup on the systray and an entry in the notification list.

I might be weird but that defeats the purpose of "background music". It's distracting me and it is spaming my notification list with useless entries. I would like to disable it, however I couldn't find a way to do so.

Please add an option in preferences so that this functionality is disabled!

[yorgosv]

Right after posting this I read a post about bugs for the aforementioned version which included a workaround:

spotify --ui.track_notifications_enabled=false

I've updated my .desktop file but please do not treat this as a solution. It is NOT and we should not compromise for workarounds as solutions! Especially since the request is nothing more than exposing existing functionality (disabling the notifications) to the preferences.

[latuprez]

This is a very annoying new "feature" from Spotify for Linux that should be made easily disableable. It only serves to interrupt my work at the present.

[durin]

I got rid of those notifications when I added the following line to the end of .config/spotify/Users/[username]-user/prefs file

ui.track_notifications_enabled=false

!Remember to use your own username in the file path!

Spotify should add a control for that setting to the preferences ui.

[durin]

There seems to be atleast one drawback with disabling the popups.

Disabling the popups also disables the Metadata function in the DBus Mpris interface.

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:'org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player' string:'Metadata'

[sleeksorrow]

Just a little recap:

With version 0.9.10, three issues with notifications on Linux have been identified and reported on the forums.

1: Spotify introduces a quite meddlesome new feature but omits to grant a user friendly way to disable it

2: as mentioned by durin, disabling the notifications in the known hackish way also disables dbus metadata announcement.

3: The popup does not show the artist, but only album and track . As it's not configurable in any known way, its usefulness is very limited.

The first two issues have been acknowledged by spotify developers and at least for the second one he sounded as if it was a small change, but nevertheless it has not been resolved in 0.9.11

The third issue has not even been confirmed by devs as far as I could find. There are surprisingly few complaints about that, so i guess that's why. Amusingly, it's the second issue that prevents me from coding a workaround for the third issue.

[KyleG]

I dont mind the notifications, but Number 3 on your list is the biggest killer. Why does it say Song and Album??? It shows me the album art, logic would have dictated to show artist. Oh well. If you do find a work around I would be curious to hear about it.

[sleeksorrow]

---

@KyleG wrote:

I dont mind the notifications, but Number 3 on your list is the biggest killer. Why does it say Song and Album??? It shows me the album art, logic would have dictated to show artist. Oh well. If you do find a work around I would be curious to hear about it.

---

Well, the workaround is to use a dbus call to query the information and then use something like notify-send to make a popup with the infos I want to see. But because of issue 2 I can only deside between having no notification at all or having 2 popups, the original and mine.

[apitts]

I am having the same issue and have not been able to get the workaround to work...i.e. editing the file does not remove the notifications.

[durin]

You have to first stop Spotify, then edit the file and restart Spotify.

The client wont reload the settings if it's running.

[apitts]

Thanks - all fixed now (well except my media keys...which skip two songs...but that is another story).

[Drumdum]

Like KyleG said the biggest killer is that the artist name isn't shown.

I would highly appreciate that being fixed/improved in the next version.

[Compgeek1996]

There's a python script available on Github that provides notifications and/or media key support. https://github.com/sveint/spotify-notify