A sneak peak into Spotify’s secret labs

Spotify Previews is a new section that showcases a few of the fun ideas and projects that our developers have been working on - mostly in their spare time, during hack days or in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep. Some of these are pet projects, some are prototypes but they’re all designed to make Spotify even more enjoyable.

The projects here are unsupported by Spotify so they may not work as planned or be removed at any time, but if you like what we’re doing let us know and if they prove popular enough they may well become regular Spotify features.

Spotify for Linux

This is a preview build of Spotify for Linux. As a preview release this version is still unsupported, but we’re running it ourselves and will try to make sure it keeps pace with its Mac and Windows siblings, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

So how do you get it? We’ve packaged the first release as a Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package. 

# 1. Add this line to your list of repositories by 
#    editing your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

# 2. Run apt-get update
# 3. (optional) If you want to verify the downloaded packages,
#    you will need to add our public key

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.de.pgp.net --recv-keys 4E9CFF4E
gpg --export 4E9CFF4E |sudo apt-key add -

# 4. Run apt-get install spotify-client-qt spotify-client-gnome-support

Spotify for Windows

This is a preview build of the Spotify desktop application, which adds support for the following Windows 7 features:

In addition to the Windows 7 specific features, we’ve updated the sharing functionality for all our supported Windows versions to include support for Messenger (in addition to Facebook and Twitter).

And finally, we’ve updated our feed to include the official Spotify tweets, which means you’ll now get recommendations, updates other Spotify news right on the home page.

Download: Spotify for Windows

Fresh from the lab