Spotify & Local Files problems on Linux

Roughly a month ago, I reviewedSpotify here on OCS-Mag, testing the recently revived Ubuntu version. Myexperience was mixed. While the media player sported good looks and a sleek interface, the overall behavior was slightly erratic, culminating in crashes when trying to play local files.

Since, I have spent more time exploring Spotify, not necessarily because I was enamored by its features and abilities, mostly because I felt it would be a worthy exercise for all those seeking the thrills of popular media streaming on linux. Furthermore, like my past endeavors with Steam, Sketchup and alike, it’s part of a possibly Don Quixotic attempt to bridge the application gap between windows and Linux, and give the users of the latter system some more freedom and choice. But there’s a cost. Sometimes, things do not work right away, or they do not work at all. This article is the diary of my journey.

Enter Fedora

In the original review we mentioned earlier, I highlighted the fact the official download page only features Debian builds. But RPM-based Fedora builds are also available in some unofficial repositories. To wit, I powered my Fedora 24 instance and set about testing. With the right extra sources in place, I was able to install and launch the client without any problems. Progress!

The looks and the behavior are largely the same, compared to the Ubuntu version, and even my profile settings and playlists were correctly synced. The one thing that did not work was the Local Files. When I tried to play any which file, a blue bar/ribbon popped up at the top of the client interface informing me that: ‘This song is not available. If you have the file on your computer you can import it.’ Well, what now?

Enter debug & missing extensions

I decided to troubleshoot by launching Spotify from the command line and observing loadtime and then runtime errors, trying to figure out if any or some of these might be related. Moreover, I also started checking the official forums, searching for common ideas and threads regarding my problem. The first and most prominent problem was Spotify complaining about some extensions:

[1111/171435:ERROR:main_delegate.cc(752)] Could not load cef_extensions.pak

Reading through the forums revealed that an extension was missing, part of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which focuses on facilitating embedded browser use cases in third-party applications, which definitely seems to be the case here. I was not 100% sure which part of the functionality, if any, was affected by this, but I thought it would be a good idea to have an error-free Spotify instance before debugging further. Once I had downloaded the package, I copied the pak:

cp cef_extensions.pak /usr/lib64/spotify-client/

This created a slightly less noise command line output for the subsequent Spotify launch, but it did not resolve the Local Files issue just yet.

Crypto errors & warnings

The second worrying piece is that Spotify complains about certain versions of SSL not having the version information available.

spotify: /lib64/libssl.so.1.0.0: no version information available (required by spotify)
spotify: /lib64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0: no version information available (required by spotify)
spotify: /lib64/libcurl.so.4: no version information available (required by spotify)

Reading on the website that provides the Fedora package:

The provided client is binary only and compiled for Ubuntu, so the Fedora package de-assembles the original Ubuntu package and moves all files in the appropriate places. To overcome library conflicts, the package contains symlinks from Fedora system libraries to match the original Ubuntu names, adds native Ubuntu OpenSSL libraries and leaves RUNPATH enabled for finding libraries on its own.

Based on the errors, I realized that perhaps the symlinks were not working as well as they could, given the difference between the Fedora and Ubuntu code base, and that this potentially might create authentication or security issues if a secure connection is required. I have not spent too much time troubleshooting this, as it was a distraction from our original missing, but again, it was nothing something that inspired me with confidence regarding our build, and the future success of this work.

As a pure act of witchcraft, some of the forum threads suggest the following package, from RPM Fusion, as a possible workaround. In my case, this did not have any effect on the errors, or the Local Files behavior:

dnf install lpf-spotify-client package WINE testing

At this point, I thought about a diversion. Why not try using the Windows version perhaps, and have it installed through the WINE framework. If only. Initially, Spotify protested it needed Windows 7 or higher. After I tweaked the default configuration, it informed me: ‘Please install Spotify using a normal account instead of an Administrator account.’ Disabling various overrides did nothing.

I even spent a good 30 minutes configuring a separate, WINE-only account, following the somewhat convoluted and partially erroneous and/or redundant but well-intentioned instructions on Bobulous Central. This was a very interesting exercise, as it involved user account creation, X Servertweaks, and a few other hacks. However, much like the initial attempt to install Spotify, it still complained about the administrator account.

In more detail, user creation:

sudo adduser --shell /bin/false wine
sudo usermod --append --groups audio wine

Sudoers change:

roger ALL=(wine) NOPASSWD: ALL

X Server tweaks:

xhost +SI:localuser:wine

Process table output:

root 27434 5714 0 18:35 pts/1 00:00:00 sudo -u wine wine /home/wine/SpotifySetup.exe
wine 27435 27434 1 18:35 pts/1 00:00:00 /home/wine/SpotifySetup.exe
wine 27438 2337 4 18:35 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/wineserver
wine 27444 2337 0 18:35 ? 00:00:00 C:\windows\system32\services.exe
wine 27446 2337 2 18:35 ? 00:00:00 C:\windows\system32\explorer.exe /desktop
wine 27450 2337 0 18:35 ? 00:00:00 C:\windows\system32\winedevice.exe
wine 27459 2337 0 18:35 ? 00:00:00 C:\windows\system32\plugplay.exe
root 27471 27381 0 18:35 pts/3 00:00:00 grep --color=auto wine Back to pure Linux

At this point, with some more reading underway and a lot of time spent poring through the strace output file, the only error that was making sense was that a file was missing from the cache. Deleting the cache folder did not yield any success or progress.

27866 stat("/home/roger/.cache/spotify/Browser/Local Storage/http_c.betrad.com_0
.localstorage", 0x7fddd6bc5580) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) Compile your own libraries This turned out to be the most significant and time-consuming piece of my work. I knew that Spotify was using hardcoded versions of libavformat and libavcodec, and that perhaps the Fedora versions were just not suitable. So I decided to compile my own, and then also use online search to find the needed libraries, extract them, and then copy the shared objects into the Spotify directory. I wanted to try both meth