This repository holds code and documentation for reverse enginnering Spotify Connect.

A while back, Spotify released a new service, Spotify Connect, which allows spekers to stream music from Spotify, while being controlled from a smartphone.

This requires a special receiver, which are only sold by a couple of manufacturers. Spotify have promised to release an SDK for a while now, but nothing was published.

This project is an effort to try and reverse enginner Spotify Connect in order to use it on any device, such as a Raspberry Pi.

All firmwares have a libspotify_embedded_shared.so file in it, provided by Spotify which contains the implementation of the protocol. The first milestone is to understand the API exposed by this library, and write our own code using it, either directly in C or using a wrapper for a higher level language.

However this file being only for the armel architecture, it cannot be run on any platform we'd like to. (Note: qemu can be used to circumvent that. More info to come) The second milestone is to understand the whole protocol and reimplement it. In addition to getting rid of a closed source blob, this would allow running on virtually any platform.

The first milestone is pretty much reached. The common/spotify.h file contains a description of the API exposed by the library. The example directory implements a very basic receiver.

The second milestone is much harder. Understaning the protocol encryption is pretty much done (docs coming). However there is a lot of packets exchanged over that encryption, and they each need to be understood. The audio is also encrypted, probably AES, so that needs to be figured out as well.

• http://divideoverflow.com/2014/08/reversing-spotify-connect/

  divideoverflow had done some initial research on it, but doesn't have any more time for it.

• https://github.com/sashahilton00/spotify-connect-resources

  sashahilton00 is centralizing information about Spotify Connect there.

• http://sourceforge.net/p/despotify/code/HEAD/tree/

  Despotify used to be an open source implementation of the Spotify protocol. It hasn't been updated in years and is out of date. However the encryption layer is extremely similar. Kudos to them for figuring it out.

Come and hang out on gitter if you need help or want to offer some. https://gitter.im/sashahilton00/spotify-connect-resources

Everything in this repository is licensed under the MIT license. Some of the code requires libspotify_embedded_shared.so to run. This file is the property of Spotify, and will not be shared here.