Hobbyist turns Macintosh SE/30 into Spotify player

Okay, the album covers look a bit pixelated and monochrome in the 1-bit version and there are devices that can start the next song faster, but otherwise it works fine: the Spotify player from the Australian hobbyist ‘Ants’. His project has even caught the eye of Spotify’s CEO.

Ants posted a topic on 68kmla.org about his project. The app he wrote for that is called MacPlayer and is on GitHub. Communication with Spotify goes through an OpenWRT router, which converts the Macintosh’s HTTP traffic into encrypted https traffic that Spotify accepts. The application works through Spotify Connect, which only works with Premium subscribers.

But even with all that beauty, there was still a problem: how can you link a Spotify account? The streaming service works with OAuth, which requires a modern browser. The solution turned out to be a web server that can solve this by coughing up a code for authentication. This authentication can then be done on, for example, a smartphone.

The encoding also turned out to be a problem: the old Macintosh cannot handle utf-8 characters. An application called libiconv turned out to be the solution. It guesses which MacRoman characters, which the Mac works with, stand for certain utf-8 characters.

The result is that the Macintosh SE/30 can serve as a remote control for, for example, speakers in the house. It can browse playlists, switch songs, adjust volume, turn on shuffle and more. There is also a setting to switch the output when multiple speakers are connected. Switching between songs is slower than on a modern device, but of course a moan who pays attention to that.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also spotted the classic Macintosh that serves as a Spotify player: Wednesday, he heeft a tweet with a link to the project retweeted. The Macintosh used was in production from 1989 to 1991.