Hi all — just adding a practical workaround for those who mainly want Spotify audio through the same playback chain as Roon, without arguing for Spotify Connect inside Roon.
I understand the licensing/commercial constraints around official integration, so this stays completely outside Roon: a small Docker container acts as a Spotify Connect endpoint and publishes the audio as a normal Icecast/HTTP stream. In Roon you simply add that URL as a Live Radio / custom station.
It’s not “deep integration” (no library merge, limited metadata, etc.), but it’s lightweight, reproducible, and doesn’t require buying another Spotify Connect box.
For anyone curious, I wrote up the setup and provide a ready-to-run Docker install here:
If this link isn’t appropriate in this thread, feel free to tell me and I’ll remove it.
Just to clarify: my free mode is essentially librespot-based, so it’s capped at Spotify’s “Very High” tier (≈320 kbps) because librespot doesn’t currently support Spotify’s newer Lossless mode.
The premium mode takes a different approach: it runs the official Spotify desktop client inside the container and exposes the audio as a FLAC Icecast stream for Roon. So when Lossless is available for your account/region and enabled in Spotify, you can feed Roon a lossless stream (and at the very least, avoid any extra lossy transcoding on the bridge).
Also, I’m intentionally keeping the “radio station” approach because it works with any Roon Core and doesn’t require users to install/manage additional Roon extensions — but I agree the audioinput API path is very interesting.
salut Vincent, I’ll give it a shot with your premium offer. Will be cool to test it out.
In the future, is there an approach you would look into to provide deeper integration while keeping it lossless ?
Hi Manu, I’m not sure to understand what you call deeper integration, but if you mean something like a roon plugin, I’m open to discussion and proposition even if my solution is aiming any radio capable player, not only roon
Small update in case it helps anyone evaluating this approach:
I’ve been focusing on the “legacy / already-owned hardware” use case rather than trying to replace Roon or Spotify. The practical goal is simply to restore a stable Spotify endpoint when the native path is gone or unreliable, and make it usable in Roon as a normal HTTP/Icecast radio input.
In other words: keep the DAC, keep the zone, keep the existing network audio chain — just swap the broken glue layer.
For people who asked privately: the lightweight path is still the easiest one to test first on a headless Debian box or NAS. If there’s interest, I can post a cleaner setup note specifically for:
Roon + legacy streamer
Roon + one fixed DAC/zone
headless Debian / Docker deployment
I’m the developer, so I’m happy to answer the awkward edge cases honestly rather than oversell it.
Honestly if this could easily look at my Spotify playlists and SoundCloud playlists and list them on my top playlists and play them on demand, I’d pay good money for that
This is not the intent to be roon specific, the fact is that, until now, spotycast is the only way to get Spotify connect standard or lossless back for headless linux music endpont like roon… and standard version is totally free.
Why not enjoying what it already brings to you before asking new features ?
Spotify Connect is clearly the way Spotify is intended to be consumed, before it was broken, I was using Spotify intégration in volumio that give exactly what you ask for.
At my sense, this was clearly unpleasant for daily use (also for stability reason). With spotycast I finally succeed at bringing back the connect feature dor all this linux headless endpoint, first for my personal use, and I decided to share with the community my tough work. I would say “What more can I do ?”
