I wanted a stable headless Spotify player for my living room. It has to run on a RaspberryPi and boot fast in order to turn it on only when needed with a switch. We will build a tcz extension to install on piCore Player. The purpose is to gain stability and performance compared to the LMS version.

Sources:

• librespot
• PiCore Player

Build

Librespot must be cross-compiled and placed in the sbin folder as librespot. Don’t forget to chmod +x librespot before creating the tcz extension.

Cross Compilation

Cross compilation of Librespot for RaspberryPi on Linux (raspbian, TinyCoreLinux, PiCore Linux…) You must be on Debian 11 minimum for the cross compilation to work(because au libs version)

Install cross-compilation tools

sudo apt install git curl pkg-config build-essential gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf lib32stdc++6 libstdc++6:armhf

Install RUST

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env

Install Libraries

We need to download arm gnueabihf version of needed libraries. We search for armhf versions in the repos. Download only the lib you need for your backend:

• alsa and alsa dev for alsa backend
• portaudio and portaudio dev for portaudio backend
• libjack and libjack dev for jack backend (default in librespot)

We also need the armhf libc

wget ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gcc-10/libstdc++6_10.2.1-6_armhf.deb

We need to configure the environement with a sysroot where we put all the libs needed for cross-compilation as librespot for arm can’t use x86 libs.

cd librespot
mkdir sysroot

Go where you’ve download the libs and decompress packages in librespot/sysroot folder.

for a in $(ls);do ar p $a data.tar.xz | tar -xv -J -C $HOME/pcp-librespot/librespot/sysroot;done

build

get the librespot sources

git submodule update --init --depth 1

or

git clone https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot.git

Configure rust for cross-compilation

echo "arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc --sysroot $HOME/sysroot \"\$@\"" >> ./cargo/bin/gcc-sysroot
chmod +x .cargo/bin/gcc-sysroot 

echo <EOF>> $HOME/.cargo/config
[build]
# Set default build target to armv7hf
target = "armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf"
# Configure linker for your target
[target.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf]
linker = "gcc-sysroot"
EOF

export PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_CROSS=1
export PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR=$HOME/librespot/sysroot/
export PKG_CONFIG_DIR
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/librespot/sysroot/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig/

configure librespot build for cross-compilation

cd librespot
rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
rustup component add rustfmt

to build librespot with alsa-backend; this is what you want for raspbian and piCore Player

cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --no-default-features --features "alsa-backend"

if you need portaudio backend do this instead

cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --no-default-features --features "portaudio-backend"

you might need to specify -L "/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf" for building.

copy the binary into the package

cp target/armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/librespot ../pcp-librespot/usr/local/sbin/
chmod +x ../pcp-librespot/usr/local/sbin/librespot

you can create the extension go to the begining of the readme

Installation

create extension to be installed

create the extension

mksquashfs pcp-librespot pcp-librespot.tcz

Install librespot extension on pcp

send it on raspi running pcp

scp pcp-librespot.tcz tc@pcp.local:
ssh tc@pcp.local
mv -v pcp-librespot.tcz /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/optional

activate start up on boot

echo pcp-librespot.tcz >> /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/onboot.lst
echo "/usr/local/etc/init.d/librespot start" >> /opt/bootlocal.sh 
pcp bu

reboot or launch the extention with

tce-load -i pcp-librespot