Recently we’ve been getting a lot of emails about Spotify support in Orange Squeeze, likely due to changes on the Spotify servers. These problems can result in very long response times from Spotify requests, where other local music plays just fine. In this post I’ll try to set some expectations for these service integrations.
In short, Orange Squeeze has no direct support for Spotify or any other streaming service (Tidal, Pandora, etc.). Instead, Orange Squeeze is a generic browser of your Squeezebox server, and it is up to the Squeezebox server to provide access to services like Spotify. It is on your server that plugins like the official Spotify plugin or the semi-official Spotty plugin are installed to provide a bridge between the Squeezebox ecosystem and a service like Spotify.
When your Spotify subscription seems to be acting up, the first place that you will see it misbehaving may be on your phone with Orange Squeeze, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think Orange Squeeze is at fault. Unfortunately, it is usually not where problems like this are solved. Nearly always, what you need to do to resolve these issues is update your Spotify plugin on the server or check your server plugin’s configuration.
You may be completely unaware of the many layers of software that collaborate to provide your music services, particularly if you have a turnkey system like a Vortexbox or Innuos Zen. Even with these turnkey systems, the underlying software is mostly the same, it’s just a convenient bundling and packaging of it. Sometimes the systems are updated as a whole, or sometimes you can update single components like plugins. Because there are such a wide variety of configurations of software and hardware, it is not feasible to provide support for these.