Spotify – the next generation talks about the just released update to Spotify with new social features like Facebook integration, integrated local tracks and music sharing. The following video gives a brief overview of the new features.
I recently wrote about the Spotify integration in XBMC. The problem with the current state of the plugin, is that it does not automatically remember account information. This means that you have to enter it each time you start xbmc, which is quite frustrating.
To remedy this, open up your advancedsettings.xml in your userdata directory. If the file doesn’t exist, just create it — it’s not there by default. Then paste the following information into the file. Note that if you have other settings there as well, just accommodate the xml to fit.
<advancedsettings> <spotify> <enable>true</enable> <username>username</username> <password>password</password> <cachefolder>a temporary directory</cachefolder> <maxsearchartists>30</maxsearchartists> <maxsearchalbums>30</maxsearchalbums> <maxsearchtracks>150</maxsearchtracks> </spotify> </advancedsettings>
Just remember to set the username, password and a directory for the music cache and you are good to go!
XBMC is a superb media center application for your Home Theatre PC, and thanks to OpenSpotify it is now possible to do all sorts of integration — for instance integrating Spotify in XBMC!
The project is called spotyxbmc so just download it and try it out. It is built from the latest XBMC release so you should be good, just copying over your user profile.
Cool features include the ability to import Spotify albums into your own music library, which blurs the lines between local and remote music in a beautiful way. It is also possible to browse your playlists and the various top lists. Just one thing, it requires a Premium Spotify account.
Remember that this is alpha, so it does crash occasionally. Fortunately, just restart xbmc and you are good to go.