Compiling

Rust

Rust 1.32.0 or later is required to build librespot, we recommend installing rust using rustup.

If you are building librespot on macOS, the homebrew provided rust may fail due to the way in which homebrew installs rust. In this case, uninstall the homebrew version of rust and use rustup, and librespot should then build.

A kernel version of 3.9 or higher is required.

Build

Once you've cloned this repository you can build librespot using cargo.

cargo build --release

The default for librespot is to build with Rodio for audio playback, and to use lewton as the decoder, which is a pure rust build on Windows and MacOS.

On Linux you'll need to follow the instructions for the ALSA backend.

Optional features

However you can use cargo's feature flags to change these defaults e.g:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features portaudio-backend

Here is a full list of available "features" and a short description.

Flag	Feature
rodio-backend	Audio playback using WASAPI/CoreAudio/ALSA via Rodio.
alsa-backend	Audio playback using alsa.
portaudio-backend	Audio playback using PortAudio.
pulseaudio-backend	Audio playback using PulseAudio.
jackaudio-backend	Audio playback using JACK.
sdl-backend	Audio playback using SDL2.
with-tremor	Vorbis decoding using the fixed-point Tremor library.
with-vorbis	Vorbis decoding using libvorbis bindings.
with-dns-sd	LAN discovery using dns-sd instead of the default mDNS.

Dependencies

Default backend - Rodio

Rodio is a high-level audio library built on top of CPAL. It is the default as it does not require any non-rust dependencies on windows or MacOS, and is able to use the native audio engines. On Linux the dependencies are the same for the ALSA backend.

Alsa backend (including Rodio when on linux)

Additionally requires pkg-config and alsa libs to be installed.

On debian / ubuntu, the following command will install these dependencies :

apt install libasound2-dev pkg-config

Or on fedora the alsa-lib-devel package.

Portaudio backend

Building requires a C compiler, and of-course portaudio.

On debian / ubuntu, the following command will install these dependencies :

sudo apt install build-essential portaudio19-dev

On Fedora systems, the following command will install these dependencies :

sudo dnf install portaudio-devel make gcc

On macOS, using homebrew :

brew install portaudio

Finally enable the feature in cargo:

cargo build --release --features portaudio-backend