Kills unused spotify pulseaudio instances

spotify-kill-pulse-client.sh

#! /bin/bash

spotifyInstances=()

while read LINE1; read LINE2; do
	IFS=':-='

	read -ra L1 <<< $LINE1
	read -ra L2 <<< $LINE2

	# trim leading/trailing spaces for error checking
	INDEX_STR=$(echo "${L1[0]}" | xargs)
	NAME_STR=$(echo "${L2[0]}" | xargs)

	if [[ $INDEX_STR != 'index' || $NAME_STR != 'application.name' ]]; then
		echo 'ERROR'
		exit
	fi

	INDEX=${L1[1]}
	NAME=${L2[1]}

	if [[ $NAME == ' "Spotify"' ]]; then
		spotifyInstances+=( $INDEX )
	fi

done < <(pacmd list-clients | grep -e 'index:' -e 'application.name')

# remove last element (active client)
unset 'spotifyInstances[${#arr[@]}-1]'

for s in ${spotifyInstances[@]}; do
	echo "pacmd kill-client $s"
	pacmd kill-client $s
done

If you prefer a one-liner:

pacmd list-clients \
  | awk '($1 == "index:") {i=$2} ($1 == "application.name" && $0 ~ /spotify/) {print i}' \
  | head -n-1 \
  | xargs -n1 pacmd kill-client

Slight modification from above:

pacmd list-clients \
  | awk '($1 == "index:") {i=$2} ($1 == "application.name" && tolower($0) ~ /spotify/) {print i}' \
  | head -n-1 \
  | xargs -n1 pacmd kill-client

thank you guys! this solved a great headache for me. hopefully this will be solved by spotify at some point, as the thread does not seem to progress

For pipewire people:

pw-dump \
  | jq '.[] | select(.type == "PipeWire:Interface:Client" and .info.props."application.name" == "spotify") | .id' \
  | head -n-1 \
  | xargs --no-run-if-empty -n1 pw-cli destroy

I love you guys