What is Oxidify?

Why Oxidify

The official Spotify client includes a browser engine and can use a significant amount of memory. Most lightweight alternatives use a terminal interface. Oxidify provides a small graphical client instead.

Oxidify is a native music player written in Rust with egui, playing music through librespot. It is a single native binary with no embedded browser engine. It starts in well under a second and uses a layout similar to Spotify’s desktop client.

Oxidify showing a playlist with the Now Playing view open and a track playing

What it does

  • Plays music on this computer. With Spotify Premium, Oxidify is a Spotify Connect device: pick it from your phone, or press play here. Gapless, up to 320 kbps, with optional volume normalisation and an on-disk audio cache.
  • Plays without Premium. Free and unconfirmed accounts are routed to alternate local playback. Oxidify races native YouTube and optional Piped search, then applies one match score across all results. yt-dlp resolves the audio URL, racing Piped when you set one. Those matches are not Spotify audio; the interface labels their actual route, and you are responsible for using this lawfully under the terms of your account and of the providers you configure.
  • Controls other devices. Move playback to a speaker, a phone, or another computer from the device picker, and keep controlling it: play, pause, skip, seek, shuffle, repeat, volume.
  • Library access. Playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, and saved episodes, filterable in the sidebar and as full pages. Playlists you own can be created, edited, and reordered.
  • Search across songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes, with artist pages, discographies, and related artists.
  • Stays out of the way. Closing the window keeps the music playing from the system tray. MPRIS means your media keys, your bar, and playerctl see it like any other player. Every common action has a keyboard shortcut.
  • Looks the part. Pages and the player bar can take a tint from the album art of whatever you are looking at or listening to; light and dark themes, or follow the system.

What it does not do

Oxidify deliberately has a limited scope:

  • Spotify Connect on this computer needs Spotify Premium, as with every librespot-based client. Browsing, search, and remote control work on any account. Free or unconfirmed accounts use alternate local audio for third-party matches; those matches are not Spotify audio.
  • Initial setup has two sign-ins because Spotify grants Web API and streaming access separately. How it connects explains why.
  • Local playback tops out at 320 kbps. Spotify protects its lossless streams with DRM that librespot does not support, and Oxidify will not circumvent it. This can change if lawful support lands upstream.
  • Alternate playback does not support podcasts, and Spotify Lossless is not available through it either.
  • No video podcasts or social features.
  • Oxidify is an unofficial client built on Spotify’s public Web API and librespot. Spotify changes these from time to time; when they do, features can break until the client catches up.

If something misbehaves, an issue should include the output of oxidify -v, what happened, and what you expected.

Account safety

We are not aware of a Spotify account being suspended for using Oxidify or another librespot player with Premium. Sign-in happens on Spotify’s own pages, audio uses the quality included with Premium, DRM stays intact, and Oxidify does not rip tracks or block ads.

Reported suspensions usually involve modded apps that remove ads from free accounts, track ripping, or stream manipulation. Oxidify does none of those things, and its contribution rules prohibit them.

Alternate local playback is different: it does not stream from Spotify at all, so Spotify’s streaming terms do not describe it. Whether matching and playing third-party audio is acceptable under the terms of your account and of the services you point it at is your responsibility. Oxidify makes no promise that any provider approves of it.

Prior art

Oxidify is derived from Fastpotify by Carmine Paolino, an MIT licensed project, and keeps its architecture and much of its code. Fastpotify itself uses librespot for Spotify playback. spotify-tui, spotify-player, and ncspot demonstrated the scope possible in a small client.

Oxidify is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Spotify AB or by the Fastpotify author. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.