Spotify Client 1.x beta for Linux has been released

[nikreiman]

Hello Linux users!

After much waiting, you'll be pleased to hear that we finally have a beta release of the 1.x client which is publicly available as of today! To gather more feedback and input, we are releasing the client to a testing repository rather than the stable one. So to get it, you'll need to add Spotify's testing repository to your apt sources, like so:

echo deb http://repository.spotify.com testing non-free | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list

If you already have Spotify's repository listed elsewhere (such as /etc/apt/sources.list), we recommend removing it and creating a separate file as shown above. After having configured the testing repository, simply run:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

...and you should see spotify-client among the list of packages which need to be updated. We will keep the 'testing' repository alive for the foreseeable future; think of it as our beta channel for Linux users.

New features in the 1.x client which are specific to the Linux client:

• Remember all those various bugs with text/mouse input in the 0.9.x client? Like the client not giving up mouse focus? Or crashing on drag/drop? Or text input not working on some window managers? Get ready to say goodbye to them. 🙂
• "Now playing" notifications can be switched off in the settings page, and libnotify is a suggested (not recommended) package dependency.
• The WM_CLASS property should be set correctly (was broken in the first unofficial beta)

Known issues/limitations with the 1.x Linux beta client (at the time of writing this post, the client version is 1.0.7.153.gb9e8174a):

• Login with Facebook Connect does not work (there is a fix for this and it will be rolled out soon)
• There is no application menu
• There is no tray icon
• Some key bindings do not work yet, like ctrl+s for shuffle, etc.
• The application is super tiny on hi-res displays
• 32-bit builds are not available yet

Regarding the application menu, all functions from the menu are accessible in other places in the client. Preliminary design for the menu has been done for this feature.

The tray icon is a bit trickier; in the 0.9.x client we got this from QT, which is no longer used in the 1.x client. We are currently evaluating how to best re-implement this feature.

The font scaling and detection of hi-res displays is also tough to fix, but the good news is that the Linux client will soon have the "zoom" feature present in Mac/Windows along with the necessary key bindings, and this setting will be persisted between sessions. Users with hi-res displays will be able to use this feature to scale the client to an appropriate resolution. This fix will be rolled out in the near future.

As for the 32-bit builds, there is some good news there. We have managed to get a working 32-bit build pipeline configured. We're currently in the process of testing and double-checking the integrity of the 32-bit builds, and we will have a 32-bit binary release soon.