TobiasVeiga00 / soloist-mpris

# soloist-mpris
**Spotify on Linux in about 60 MB of RAM, with your bar, media keys and `playerctl` working.**
Spotify's desktop app is a whole Chromium browser running one web page. In
2026 Spotify released Soloist,
its official headless player for Linux: a tiny Spotify Connect speaker with no
window and no browser. It sounds great and costs almost nothing, but the rest
of your desktop cannot see it. Your bar shows nothing, play/pause does nothing,
and `playerctl` finds no player.
This kit fixes that. It installs Soloist, keeps it updated, and adds
`soloist-mpris`, a small Rust bridge that publishes Soloist as a standard
MPRIS player.
## What you get
- **Spotify as a background service.** It starts with your session and shows
 up in Spotify Connect as this computer.
- **Your desktop knows what is playing.** Waybar, Quickshell, GNOME, KDE and
 any other MPRIS client get the title, artist, album, cover art and progress.
- **Media keys and `playerctl` work**: play/pause, next, previous, seek,
 volume, shuffle and repeat.
- **15x lighter than the desktop app.** About 60 MB of RAM and 3% of one
 core while playing, against more than 900 MB for Spotify's app
 (benchmark).
- **Official playback.** Soloist is Spotify's own player, so it is not affected
 by the audio key refusals
 that stop librespot-based clients on many accounts.
- **Restarts do not stop the music.** When Soloist restarts while it is
 playing (a weekly update, a reinstall), the bridge takes playback back
 within seconds. After a reboot, or when another device had the music, it
 leaves things as they are.
- **No expiry surprises.** Soloist builds stop working after 90 days, so a
 weekly timer fetches the current one from Spotify.
## How light is it?
Same laptop (ThinkPad T480, i5-8350U, Arch Linux), same song, 60 seconds of
playback each, measured with `bench/measure.sh`:
| | RAM (PSS) | CPU (one core) | Installed size |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Soloist + soloist-mpris** | **61 MB** | **3%** | **40 MB** |
| Spotify desktop app, window hidden | 922 MB | 10% | 387 MB |
| Spotify desktop app, window open | 943 MB | 27% | 387 MB |
Installed size is the program files on disk (`soloist` and `soloist-mpris`
against Spotify's install directory), caches excluded.
That is **15 times less memory** and less than a third of the CPU, even when
the official app sits hidden in the background. The desktop app is a Chromium
browser showing Spotify's web page, spread over 9 processes.
Here, three small processes play the music and nothing renders at all.
Run the same measurement on your machine while music plays:
 [code] 
## Choosing what to play
Soloist is a speaker: it has no library or search of its own. You pick music
with any Spotify Connect controller and play it here:
- the **Spotify app on your phone** (devices icon, then this computer);
- **open.spotify.com** in any browser, closed again
 when the music is going;
- a native client such as Spotifast, used
 as a remote control;
- the terminal: