fastpotify

Fastpotify is a Spotify client written in Rust that starts in well under a second and sits at 100 to 250 MB of RAM, against the 600 MB to over 1 GB the official desktop app routinely uses. There is no browser engine inside it. It plays through librespot, shows up on your network as a Spotify Connect device, and covers the full library: playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, search, artist and album pages, queue management, and playlist editing. MIT licensed, runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Nothing to run beyond the app itself. It finds librespot, spotifyd and hardware receivers on your network over mDNS and lists them as devices, so you can push playback to a speaker or another machine and keep controlling it. Gapless playback up to 320 kbps with optional volume normalization and an on-disk cache.

Free, no tiers, no account of its own. This is the desktop client for anyone on Linux who has given up on the official app, or on an older Mac where the Electron build drags. Anyone happy with the official client is not missing much. For a self-hosted library with no Spotify involved at all, look at Navidrome (navidrome/navidrome).

The catch is that the software being free does not make the music free. Playback requires Spotify Premium. Free accounts can browse and search and that is where it stops, so this saves you memory, not the $12.99 per month.