Do you use the music discovery and sharing service known as Spotify? Whether you’re in a country that’s just gained access to it (like the United States) and you’ve just gotten hip to the Spotify scene or you’ve been using it for ages, Spotify is one of the easiest ways to discover new music, listen to old favorites, and share it all with your friends (recently made ridiculously easy via Facebook). There are a couple of monthly payment models of the service, but if you don’t mind listening to an advertisement every now and again, Spotify is free.
Drawing on his own trials and tribulations in the Spotosphere, Gnomie Henry Cole has been kind enough to share his five favorite ways to enhance your Spotify experience. Take ‘er away, Henry!
Spotify has had a huge impact on changing the way we listen to music. It has saved me an immense amount of money since I switched from buying individual songs on iTunes, and almost every premium user that I have spoken to, including myself, has emphasized how much easier and more cost-effective it is in comparison to more traditional solutions.
Spotify does of course have its weaker points, but thankfully a number of developers have stepped forward and built their own solutions to overcome some of these. So here is a list of my top five tools and add-ons for Spotify, to help give you an overall more enjoyable experience.
Equalify
A much-requested feature for Spotify is an equalizer. Sadly, Spotify has shown very little interest in adding anything along these lines, but Equalify is simply a fantastic solution to this. It works as a separate DLL, which is integrated with the main Spotify application, and therefore fits into the Spotify GUI seamlessly without running as a separate application. It really does make a huge difference to the sound of your music, and is a must-have for any music lover. The only shortfall is that Equalify is not available for Mac or Linux, but if you’re running Windows, I would strongly recommend giving it a go.
Web site: equalify.me
Lyrify
We all know how tiresome it can be finding lyrics online, especially when virtually every lyrics site is piled with an abundance of adverts, including pop-ups and pop-unders. Lyrify is a great solution to this problem, with limited advertising to support the developers whilst causing minimal interference with your lyrics search. The interface is sleek and fits well with Spotify. It is, however, a standalone application, so sadly you have to have it running to find lyrics, rather than the seamless Spotify integration found in Equalify, for example. Lyrify is unfortunately also a Windows-only application.
Web site: lyrify.com
FoxyTunes
FoxyTunes is a neat little Firefox add-on which allows you to control not just Spotify, but pretty much every major music player from the comfort of your browser. I found this to be a fantastic time saver when I looked at how much I previously flicked back and forth between windows whenever I needed to skip or adjust the volume. FoxyTunes is also available for Internet Explorer, but not Chrome.
Web site: foxytunes.com
If you’re a Chrome user, there is also the unofficial Spotify Chrome Extension, which you can find at ur.cx/UPV. The only worry with this is that it has access to your browsing data, etc. — but if you’re using Chrome, you’re probably used to that!
Spotibot
Spotibot is a simple but powerful tool to help you discover new music based on your current tastes. You can either enter the name of a band/artist, or your Last.fm username, and it will generate a complete Spotify playlist of the length of your choice. It is then simply a one-click process to import that playlist into Spotify. The whole tool is simply a Web site, so you can use it from any platform, be it your PC, Mac, tablet, or phone.
Web site: spotibot.com
ShareMyPlaylists
Although Spotify has the ability to share playlists with people via a link, there isn’t really a way to share your playlists with the general public while also being able to search for and discover other people’s playlists. Thankfully, ShareMyPlaylists does just this. It’s an online portal for searching and discovering new music by means of Spotify playlists. This brings a much greater social experience to using Spotify, and enables you to find great music both old and new.