Spotify 0.4 in WINE: “File is an unsupported format”

I bought Serengeti‘s album Standing Steady on MP3 from Bengans and wanted to play it in Spotify as “Local Files”. It worked perfectly in MS Windows, but on Ubuntu I got “File is an unsupported format”. WTF?

Spotify acknowledges this:

Spotify uses the system-supplied MP3 decoder on all platforms, and during our limited testing we found the Wine decoder to be excessively unstable on quite a few MP3 files, including some from our purchase partners. We are therefore blocking codecs with the identifier “WINE-MPEG3″ until the Wine system works satisfactorily.

One workaround I found involved recompiling or binary-patching WINE. Not so fun.

The official support forum contained a solution based around installing Windows Media Player 10. I have downloaded and installed it now according to the instructions, but already the playback froze once. Well, Spotify isn’t perfectly reliable in WINE anyway, so this is probably Good Enough.

libspotify – the official Spotify library!

Spotify opens its doors to developers and releases libspotify. Nice!

The C API and examples look very clean. It’s even possible to play songs through the API and I guess that’s much more than anyone expected. Some might complain that the library is binary-only for Linux on IA-32 but I won’t…

If I had a premium account I would probably spend a lot of time toying with their API the next few days!

It would be perfect for the never-gonna-happen project with a car computer connecting to AUX or CD changer input on the car stereo. The car computer could be based on an ALIX board, run Linux from Compact Flash and use an USB-based mobile broadband to download songs.