Btw I made a single commit for the update + ALSA fix. Please tell me if I should split them.

It seems I messed up something with the maintainers list.

It seems I messed up something with the maintainers list.

You need to add yourself to https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix to fix this.

Thanks!

Tested locally (and actually played music this time @timokau !). Thank you @angristan

I just tested this and unfortunately it doesn't work for me :/ Does apulse need any setup?

I built spotify from current master and ran it from the result symlink. It doesn't crash at playback, but I don't get any sound either. Pulse audio doesn't report any playback.

@timokau thanks for the feedback. I guess this has something to do with APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE.

Are you going to debug this? Otherwise I propose we revert this update for now, before it hits the unstable channel. I'll probably not be the only one with the issue.

Its annoying, I know. But an old version is better than a version that only works for some users.

Let's revert it again 🎉

Though if we don't get feedback from users where it doesn't work properly, it will be hard to fix.

Well you have at least one test subject where it doesn't work. If you have anything you want me to try, I'd be happy to.

Yes I agree this is enough to say Spotify on master is broken.

Do you have any specific audio config?

Mine is:

  hardware.pulseaudio = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.pulseaudioFull;
  };

Maybe try other audio devices like APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE = hw:0,0?

For dmix works because apparently this is the output used when multiple programs emit sound. hw:0,0 works too because it corresponds to my sound card (aplay -l)

I doubt this would work for people with alsa, but for me, this patch works on a networked pulseaudio setup:

diff --git a/pkgs/applications/audio/spotify/default.nix b/pkgs/applications/audio/spotify/default.nix
index 4c08a8d285d..9327a8e124c 100644
--- a/pkgs/applications/audio/spotify/default.nix
+++ b/pkgs/applications/audio/spotify/default.nix
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 { fetchurl, stdenv, squashfsTools, xorg, alsaLib, makeWrapper, openssl, freetype
 , glib, pango, cairo, atk, gdk_pixbuf, gtk2, cups, nspr, nss, libpng, libnotify
 , libgcrypt, systemd, fontconfig, dbus, expat, ffmpeg_3, curl, zlib, gnome3
-, at-spi2-atk, at-spi2-core, apulse
+, at-spi2-atk, at-spi2-core, libpulseaudio
 }:
 
 let
@@ -21,8 +21,8 @@ let
 
 
   deps = [
+    libpulseaudio
     alsaLib
-    apulse
     atk
     at-spi2-atk
     at-spi2-core
@@ -136,8 +136,6 @@ stdenv.mkDerivation {
       librarypath="${stdenv.lib.makeLibraryPath deps}:$libdir"
       wrapProgram $out/share/spotify/spotify \
         --prefix LD_LIBRARY_PATH : "$librarypath" \
-        --prefix LD_LIBRARY_PATH : "${apulse}/lib/apulse" \
-        --set APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE plug:dmix \
         --prefix PATH : "${gnome3.zenity}/bin"
 
       # fix Icon line in the desktop file (#48062)

No specific config, just enabling pulseaudio. hw:0,0 doesn't work.

I can play a file with aplay -D default file.wav (but setting default as APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE doesn't work, which is why you changed it to plug:dmix). When I use aplay -D plug:dmix file.wav I get

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1108:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
aplay: main:828: audio open error: Device or resource busy

Curiously enough @asj124's fix works for me. So maybe we don't need apulse at all but just libpulseaudio?

@ajs124's patch works for me too.

@ajs124, can you submit that as a PR? Pulseaudio is required for a bunch of programs nowadays anyway. I'm not sure if spotify worked with plain alsa before.

Right now, spotify 1.0.x (on 19.03) connects to my pulseaudio through the alsa emulation. So I assume it would work with plain ALSA. Meaning, my patch might break backwards compatibility?

You're right, just dropping alsa support entirely would be a bit of a cop out in that case. On the other hand, I don't feel like supporting it when upstream apparently doesn't care for it.

Let's do the revert first to take the urgency out of it: #65833

I did some debugging. Apparently plug:dmix plays on hw:0,0 by default. I use my HDMI output though, which is hw:1,3.

If I set the output device to plug:'dmix:CARD=1,DEV=3' I can get it to work. But that differs per user of course. You can probably change the default alsa device somehow, but that would mean that pulseaudio users (which are probably the majority of users) would have to configure alsa to get spotify to work.

Any ideas how we can have the cake and eat it too? Maybe detect an available pulseaudio daemon at runtime and only use apluse if it can't be found (would be nice if apluse had a mode to do that automatically). But then I'm still not sure if plug:dmix would work for every alsa user, I just don't know enough about alsa/pulseaudio.

Maybe detect an available pulseaudio daemon at runtime

Please don't. There is no pulseaudio daemon running on my system, since I only use it over the network.

Has anyone without pulseaudio tested what happens with my patch? Did they actually drop support for plain ALSA?

Maybe detect an available pulseaudio daemon at runtime

Please don't. There is no pulseaudio daemon running on my system, since I only use it over the network.

Good point. But what I generally meant was "do whatever the application would do to detect pulseaudio", it wouldn't necessarily need to be a check for the daemon.

Has anyone without pulseaudio tested what happens with my patch? Did they actually drop support for plain ALSA?

I haven't tested it since I couldn't get audio working on my system with pulseaudio disabled.

The issue is that spotify doesn't officially support anything on linux. While there is code for alsa support in spotify, it has led to segfaults for months now. And according to the comments in that thread that is not the first issue with alsa.

So alsa is definitely not in their test matrix (if they even test anything...) and they apparently don't care about it either. Effectively unsupported.

I have been battling this for months now lol.
I've gone through such absurd Alsa/Pulse setups trying to get Brave to work (Pulse) and Spotify to work (Alsa).
I sincerely hope y'all crack the case <3

Continued in #72596, feel free to review.