Run Spotify with Wine

Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. They achieve this by licensing the tracks from record companies in a similar way to radio stations, and they pay for it with advertising. You hear the occasional advert between tracks, and there are also options to pay a monthly subscription for a premium account. They do have a preview version client for Linux which I installed, but everytime I try to log in I get the message Use of this device is not enabled for your account. From their site : 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. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.
Luckily it runs well under wine . With the open version you will get 20 hours per month of streaming ( free ).
There is a problem playing local files with wine though. A solution is not far away, what I used was :
wget http://webupd8.googlecode.com/files/winemp3.acm -O ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/winemp3.acm
After that run winecfg and under the Libraries tab enter winemp3.acm under New override for library and click Add. Have fun with Spotify !

There's even Despotify , an open source client and library for Spotify’s streamed music platform. Spotify decided to block access for non-premium subscribers. !

 If you want to disable the spotify tray icon you should start reading here .