SpotRec

Python script to record the audio of the Spotify desktop client using FFmpeg and PulseAudio

AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotrec/

Usage

If you have a GNU/Linux distribution with a different package manager system, you can simply run:

python3 ./spotrec.py

Example

What follows is my favourite configuration, your taste / software / hardware might differ...

First of all run spotify, to avoid annoing ads I would recommend you Spotify-AdKiller:

./spotify-wrapper.sh

Then you can run the python script which will record the music:

./spotrec.py --debug --mute-sink -o ./my_song_dir --skip-intro --tmp-file --underscored-filenames

Check the pulseaudio configuration:

pavucontrol

Pay attention to the red circles, everything else is muted and with volume set to 0%

Note: actually "Lavf..." will appear after you start playing a song

Finally start playing whatever you want

Troubleshooting

If one of the following scenarios happens:

• you do not see something like the ffmpeg output, which should appear right few seconds after the song start

# what you should see when ffmpeg is recording ...
size=56400kB time=00:00:04.15 bitrate= 130.7kbits/s speed=1x

• you do not see any "Lavf..." in the pavucontrol recording tab
• you get a stacktrace ending with:

ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'nput'

I would suggest you to:

• quickly press the "next song button" and then the "previous song button" in the spotify client
• stop everything and start over, after some tries it usually works :)

Note: sometimes spotify detects when the user does not interact with the application for a long time (more or less an hour) and starts looping over a song, to avoid this scenario I would suggest to keep interacting with the spotify client.