Spotify Screensaver Manual

spotify-screensaver is an elegant, resource-friendly desktop screensaver featuring a live OLED clock, Spotify metadata, audio spectrum visualization (live capture on supported Linux systems), and an inactivity daemon for Linux and Windows. The software is under development.

Highlights in v1.4: 64-band FFT when audio capture is available on Linux; Windows and unavailable audio inputs use a synthetic spectrum, adaptive cover color palette extraction, advertisement handling, and circular visualizer mode.

Architecture & MPRIS D-Bus

On Linux, the application queries MPRIS-compatible players through playerctl. The playerctl program must be available:

• Local discovery: No Spotify developer account is needed for MPRIS playback information.
• Playback state: Track, playback, and position are polled via playerctl; this is not a direct D-Bus signal subscription.
• Standby: When playback is paused or unavailable, the screen switches to a quiet clock view.

Audio Spectrum & Visualizer

Bars Mode

48 discrete frequency bars with physical peak-hold drops and smooth gradients.

Wave Mode

Flowing oscilloscope wave with soft ambient neon glow and tunable sensitivity.

Circular Mode

360° radial frequency spectrum surrounding album art with pulsing bass accents.

Mirrored Mode

Mirrored dual columns radiating symmetrically outwards from the center.

Installation & Operating Modes

Download and run

# Linux x86_64
tar -xzf spotify-screensaver-*-linux.tar.gz
./spotify-screensaver

# Fullscreen screensaver mode
./spotify-screensaver -fullscreen

# Browser mode
./spotify-screensaver -browser

# Start after five minutes of inactivity
./spotify-screensaver --idle-timeout=300

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
Space	Play / Pause
→ / ←	Next / Previous Track
↑ / ↓	Volume +/- 5%
F or F11	Toggle Fullscreen
ESC	Exit / Close Settings

Security & Troubleshooting

The integrated web server binds to 127.0.0.1:43210 by default with anti-DNS-rebinding and CSRF mitigation. OAuth tokens are secured via AES-256-GCM and PBKDF2 (100,000 rounds).

Troubleshooting: WebKitGTK Linux Performance

If encountering rendering lags on specific GPU drivers, launch with:

WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 ./spotify-screensaver