Spotify-Notify Brings NotifyOSD Notifications For Spotify Running Under Wine

Spotify is great for the music it brings to its users but it lacks a lot of features. There are some native Linux Spotify clients (including an official one), but they don't support free accounts so those using the Windows version of Spotify under Wine (that's the only way to use Spotify with a free account in Linux) must use tweaks to make it a bit more functional, like the "fix" to make it play local mp3 files we wrote about a while back.

Here is yet another such 'tweak' to get the Windows version of Spotify (under Wine) to display NotifyOSD notifications for Ubuntu users. For this, you'll have to download Spotify-notify, a tiny application written in Python which displays notifications for Spotify on every song change. The script uses last.fm in order to fetch album cover and data.

Download and use Spotify-Notify

1. Before downloading Spotify-Notify, you'll have to install some dependencies required for it to run. Open a terminal and paste this:

sudo apt-get install python-xlib python-notify

2. Then, download Spotify-Notify, extract it and place it somewhere like in your home folder.

3. Run Spotify-Notify like so:

cd ~/spotify-notify #presuming you've place it into your home folder
python spotify-notify.py

You can either make a shortcut for it, make a script which starts both Spotify and Spotify-Notify or add Spotify-Notify to your startup application - it's up to you how you use it.