Fastpotify: a lightweight native Spotify client written in Rust

A new open-source desktop application called Fastpotify offers an alternative to Spotify's official client, aiming at what the web-based app gives up: resource use and startup time. It is a native binary rather than an embedded browser, written in Rust with the egui toolkit and librespot, and released under the MIT licence.

What it offers

According to the project page, Fastpotify starts in well under a second and typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM. It plays music locally, gapless and at up to 320 kbps, and can also control playback on a speaker, phone or television through Spotify Connect from the same window.

Playlists, Liked Songs, albums, artists and podcasts can be browsed, the catalogue searched, and playlists the user owns edited.

Winamp skins and MilkDrop

The client ships with a mini player, opened with Ctrl+M, that can load classic Winamp 2 skins — including .wsz files from the Winamp Skin Museum — and includes a spectrum analyser, equalizer, playlist, shade modes and integer pixel scaling.

It can also run projectM's implementation of the MilkDrop visualiser in its own window, resizable or fullscreen, with keyboard controls. On first use the app automatically downloads the original MilkDrop 2 preset packs and projectM's Cream of the Crop collection, giving more than 10,000 presets that react to local playback.

Platforms and controls

Builds are available for Linux, macOS and Windows. The app supports keyboard shortcuts, MPRIS media controls on Linux and an optional tray mode that keeps music playing after the window is closed. Light, dark and system themes are included, and pages and the player bar can take their colour from the album art. The documentation explains how the client connects to Spotify and how stored credentials are handled.