I have installed Raspotify and the Mycroft Spotify Skill and thanks to the great help in this forum I have them connecting to my Premium Spotify account and playing through Raspotify on the same machine - with one catch.
On a fresh startup when I ask Mycroft to play something from Spotify, it can’t find any devices, saying " Spotify couldn’t start playback. I couldn’t find any Spotify devices".
ps -ef | grep reaspot shows /usr/bin/librespot is running, but for some reason the skill can’t find it.
However, If I then launch the Spotify app on my Mac and go to Settings -> Open Devices Menu -> and click the device that shows called “raspotify” it somehow “pokes” Raspotify because immediately re-issuing the same voice command to Mycroft works! I don’t even have to start a stream playing from my Mac first. Just clicking the device on the Mac client seems to make Raspotify visible to Mycroft on the Rasperry Pi both are running on.
Has anyone seen this behavior before? Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?
BTW I assume I have to use Raspotify and can’t just have the skill stream directly the way, say, the news skill does? If that’s possible I can’t figure out how to make that simpler setup work either.