What i find the most interesting is the zeroconf option [0].
For example you can set up your spotifyd daemon on a raspberry and have it always connected to speakers.
Now when someone is in your local network they can choose your spotifyd daemon and play spotify over the speakers without connecting to the speakers directly via bluetooth etc.
I have this. It’s great except it randomly fails and disconnects or refuses to play. Have tried many updates for multiple years and always the same. I resorted to airplay. Spotify doesn’t want to integrate with others and so the reverse engineered api doesn’t work great
I've got a setup where I play photo slideshows on my TV, and also want to play Spotify through my TV/speakers. I've resorted to just spinning up a Spotify webview when the RPI boots XFCE, and it works pretty reliably so far.
I do this with librespot on my always-on Pi running Kodi. Works well. It's the only reason I bother with Spotify. The instant it stops working, I cancel my Spotify subscription.
Yeah, but it's kinda clunky. It also uses the same librespot (or one of the various forks) under the hood.
And now they've also "improved" their default interface with ultra-skinny fonts. Granted, I have a ridiculously bad 1080p laptop screen, but the font is so skinny that I only see colored pixels instead of white.
I haven't looked at the Volumio interface in years. It's running on a Pi inside an old boombox, and in a VM on the PC in my garage with a USB sound card passed through.
I exclusively use it for Spotify Connect like I would a Chromecast Audio (if I had one).
For example you can set up your spotifyd daemon on a raspberry and have it always connected to speakers.
Now when someone is in your local network they can choose your spotifyd daemon and play spotify over the speakers without connecting to the speakers directly via bluetooth etc.
[0] https://spotifyd.github.io/spotifyd/config/File.html (after the configuration file example)