Spotify Ad Blocker

Windows only!

Simply download the latest release and run it.

Spotify Ad Blocker is portable and can be controlled through the tray icon. It blocks ads by muting Spotify (and only Spotify) while they are running.

Inspired by EZBlocker - great stuff, would not have gotten the idea to do this without it!

What's different about Spotify Ad Blocker?

• flexibility (Spotify doesn't need to keep running)
• minimalism (No UI aside from the tray menu and options aside from automatic startup)

Reporting bugs

Run spotify-ad-blocker.exe --debug until those problems occur and then copy/paste the contents of %APPDATA%/spotify-ad-blocker/error.log as well as %APPDATA%/spotify-ad-blocker/debug.log into your issue description.

Development Notes

Please note that I am not too familiar with native code development and I was struggling a bit to make things work. If you know better and would like to clean up the build progress for various C/C++ code, I appreciate any contribution.

Building is a prerequisite to using yarn start. (Not triggered automatically on every start because it takes a while)

Building

This is only relevant if you for some reason want to build this project yourself - maybe you want to fork it or something. (Plus - notes to my future self 😉)

Requirements

• g++ (install e.g. by following this guide https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-mingw#_prerequisites )

• process-list requires the installation of C++ ATL, which is an optional feature of the Visual Studio build tools when installing desktop development with C++ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022

• Run yarn build

Deployment

• After building, if the new .exe icon doesn't show up in e.g. Explorer, run ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache on Win7, ie4uinit.exe -show on Win10.

Patches

pkg

• Patching projectToNearby was necessary so that pkg doesn't look for .node files where it was started (execpath) but the cwd (which we manipulate).
• Removing the override of spawn enables us to spawn ourselves on exit. Makes it possible for this to be a standalone executable that doesn't leave a mess behind (see cleanup branch in bootstrap.js).

winreg

• Without this patch, toggling "Run on startup" would briefly pop up a command prompt.

Misc

• Latest Node that process-list supports seems to be v14, otherwise: error C2039: 'AccessorSignature': is not a member of 'v8' [C:\...\spotify-ad-blocker\node_modules\process-list\build\processlist.vcxproj] . And requires ATL to be installed - which I can't get installed on my machine at the time => no compilation possible.
• Since pkg doesn't allow for including of native addons in the package, we rename them to .foolpkg temporarily.
• The npm scripts are intentionally called e.g. beforebuild instead of prebuild to ensure consistency between using yarn vs. npm vs. whatever.

TODO

Nothing in terms of functionality, just improving the implementation:

• Would be nice to have a custom process description in task manager instead of Node.js: .... Unfortunately, modifying this with ResourceHacker doesn't work and other tools I've tried also didn't work.
  Apparently, rcedit can be safely used on the files in pkg's .pkg-cache, so maybe that would work but... modifying files in third party parts of the build pipeline seems very dirty to me.
  An acceptable solution might be to implement features in pkg that let the user a) only fetch the binaries b) let the user specify the node binary to be used. So one could do a), then copy the binary into a temp directory, modify it and use b) to tell pkg to use that one instead of the one from its own cache.
  If someone reads this, thinks it's a good idea and finds the time to implement this in pkg (and zeit actually merges the features), please do let me know.