Plan

Premium(Family)

Country Germany

Hey, for many of you (including me) Spotify Connect stopped working in March/April 2022 mostly on aged playback devices (Legrand, Sony, Cambridge Audio etc. seem to be affected). For me it is a Cambridge Audio Minx Air 200v2.

I've seen threads in this forum where people are advised to change their DNS settings to googles DNS Service which awakened my curiosity. Why would it work only with googles DNS? The answer will be because this DNS Service is not working properly (read on).

What is the player doing?

My player resolved the address esdk-ffl.spotify.com over the DNS and then tries to connect to this URL endlessly... I assume that this is a deprecated API endpoint for getting the spotify access points. I cannot proof because the API documentation is unfortunately under lock by spotify. The player should normally get into a timeout and try the fallback URL, but the firmware is not so well designed, so this is not happening.

Why is it working with google DNS?

Google DNS is not able to resolve the address esdk-ffl.spotify.com causing the player to directly use the fallback URL which is apresolve.spotify.com in my case. This is a working API endpoint and so spotify connect is working again.

What is google DNS doing wrong?

The DNS NS record for the zone spotify.com point in my case to dns1.p07.nsone.net. This seems to be one of spotifys secondary DNS Servers and so authorative for this zone. This server is providing a CNAME record for esdk-ffl.spotify.com so I see no reason, why google DNS should not be able to resolve this. It seems that googles DNS service is not really transparent and they have overwritten this particular record. Any DNS resolver is returning NOERROR with a walid answer. Google Public DNS is returning NXDOMAIN. Is google trying to solve Spotifys technical issues? Very strange thing...

What could the vendors do?

They could release firmware updates where the (deprecated?) API Endpoint is removed. But I guess this is not realistic... Many vendors don't take responsibility for for their contribution to the littering of the planet and if you like a new firmware you have the buy a new device from their recent lineup. Also the efford would be quite big. Many different vendors would have to patch the software for multiple devices, have to run quality assurence processes etc.etc. Spotify could fix this issue for all by changing one single config line!

What should spotify do?

Spotify could either fix the API endpoint behind esdk-ffl.spotify.com. If it is really deprecated I guess they won't do. More likely they could remove the DNS record for esdk-ffl.spotify.com. This will silly firmwares move to use the fallback URL, which is working. And it is so little effort, just removing one line of config in their master DNS' zone file, fixing the issue with many players at once.

P.S. The DNS guys should really start talking to the API guys. And the customers should not have to do their job...

Related:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Connecting-to-Minx-XI-recently-started-failing-when...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Connecting-to-Minx-XI-recently-started-failing-when...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/Spotify-Connect-Cast-no-longer-working-properly/td-p/5...

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Connecting-to-the-Nuvo-audio-system-not-working/idi-...