Fix Spotify install in Ubuntu 11.10

In the last couple of weeks, I've been using Spotify to listen to music during work, and more and more at home. Unfortunately, it seems like the developers at Spotify prefer to develop for Windows, the Windows client in the office just runs without problems, and it's regularly updated.

The "Linux Preview" version is first of all a bit tricky to install, and doesn't seem to be updated in a while.  (Plus, it's not too smart that I - living in the Netherlands - cannot change the language of the page to English, if I choose the Netherlands under the 'Land' menu, I must read the whole page in Dutch.)

So, for some songs and albums I've got an error message saying

"There is a problem with the sound decoder. Spotify can't play music"

After checking everything I could with my sound settings - I own a Logitech Cooling pad with built-in speakers for my notebook, that caused me some difficulties to install under Ubuntu, but that's another story - I've found that the spotify-client-qt package depends on the libavcodec52 (3) and libavformat52 (4) packages which seem to be missing.

With some googling, I've found (1,2) that I'm - of course - not alone with this issue, and the missing packages are from an earlier version of Ubuntu. Not that I don't trust other people posting files to download services for patching your system (I don't, and you shouldn't either), downloaded the two mentioned packages from the 'local' ubuntu repository, and a third one: libavutil50 (5) because of dependency.

Installed them in the following order - and commands:

dpkg -i libavutil50_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libavcodec52_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libavformat52_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb

... and finally I can listen to Peter Gabriel songs in Spotify!

Note that I'm using 64bit Ubuntu, so if you use 32bit, you have to download and install the *_i386.deb packages.

Thanks for the authors of the original posts!

Links:

1. https://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/ubuntu_lucid_spotify_linux_preview_local_files_problem_with_sound_decoder
2. http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/how-to-install-native-spotify-linux.html
3. http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/liba/libav/libavcodec52_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb
4. http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/liba/libav/libavformat52_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb
5. http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/liba/libav/libavutil50_0.6.4-0ubuntu0.11.04.1_amd64.deb