hi MPUers
For those who use Spotify (or any other app) Do you have a good workflow for handling and listening to music?
Context: If listening to any music, to do anything, requires opening the app. There’s no mini-player, or even if one could hover over the icon and just get a visual of what’s playing or coming up next.
I have a Stream Deck that I use for now of just having playlists to start up right away. Any other geekery out there?
This:
You can do a lot of stuff on the Stream Deck too.
Every playlist has an URL. You can use that to create a button that takes you directly to a playlist of your choice.
To get the link (see screenshot):
On the Stream Deck:
a. Create new button with System->Website
b. Paste the playlist URL
c. Repeat as many times you want!
Here’s my Spotify page on the Stream Deck:
Bonus: give it a nice icon. I recommend the Button Creator app. You can get it on the Mac App Store.
I recommend Spotica. But it’s still a bother to me to click it (ha ha!) and so now, I’m sporting Spotify Mini workflow for Alfred. One keyboard shortcut press and I can control my music using a keyboard.
I use Silicio as mini player for Spotify
Also on the mac app store
Music is important enough to me to always want the full player running in a window. My mood and need for focus will determine which playlist or album I’m starting. I mostly shuffle my playlists and play albums in track order.
Currently the collection is split across 32 playlists, and a whole lot of albums and individual tracks “starred”.
Any new discoveries goes directly into one or more relevant playlists - that’s the only “workflow” related action I can think of.
This is incidental to your post – but I love that playlist! Great choice.
I am a Spotify family subscriber but in truth I am really not a fan of its UI, and less and less so as time moves on and Spotify ‘innovates’. I am forever looking for an excuse to swap back to Apple Music. For some reason I haven’t done so yet – time, laziness, many playlists added to Spotify, and apparently, one of its strengths is the ‘recommend’ function which AM is less good at – but I may jump.
Spotify look less and less like a lean and organisable music catalogue and more and more like a social media network. I particularly dislike the random front page headers, e.g. at the moment for me, ‘Hot Right Now’, or ‘All Things Indie’. These aren’t things I listen to so can’t understand what it’s doing there, other than them wanting to flog new music which I don’t much care for.
I will have a look at the alternative players recommended here - some nice options!
Alternatively, if anybody is willing to persuade me to abandon Spotify for good and move along to Apple Music, it probably won’t require much of a push.
For those looking for a way to switch to a different service, I really recommend SongShift
The currently playing track should show up in the Control Center. Fn+c is the key command to bring that up.
Thank you for this recommendation. I saw that I have downloaded it before but I am guessing I have deleted it because it didn’t support Spotify before.
I modify the Spotify Mini for Alfred workflow slightly such that when I press my hotkey, Alfred will surface Silicio to show me what’s playing now, and then with another hotkey I could run Spotify Mini commands.
But, Sicilio is quite feature complete and supports keyboard shortcut, so you don’t really need the Alfred workflow.
