Spotify now playing desktop

Made by Replay, a tiny studio making simple apps for your Mac, brought to you by

We recently rolled out changes to the ‘now playing bar’ [NPB] and the ‘tab bar’ in the app. And while these updates might be on the subtle side, don’t be fooled into thinking these are just small tweaks. We’ve been finessing this valuable bit of product real estate to make room for some bigger changes [more on that later] all championed by a team of designers with a vision for a better app experience.

Designers have good instincts. They know when to take big risks that pay off, and when to make a strong argument for prioritizing design- and experience-driven work over metrics-based feature improvements.

In the case of the recent changes to the NPB, the design teams who work on the app could see that by updating the UI, not only could they improve the experience, they could make space for some of the bigger changes that other teams wanted to ship further down the line, such as improving machine learning capabilities — an observation that helped get stakeholder buy-in. 

At Spotify, there are many teams contributing to the consumer mobile experience and, for quite some time, these different groups all found they were facing the same blockers when it came to the NPB and the navigation. As static features, they took up a lot of room in the app. It also wasn’t clear to all listeners that when you tapped the NPB, it would lead to a more immersive ‘now playing view’, where you can dive deeper into the art, lyrics, and story behind the music. 

While the problems were apparent to a lot of people, getting fixes for them on a roadmap was difficult — they needed to prove that these visual updates would primarily lead to more flexibility and unlock experimentation while also putting content first and allowing creators’ work to shine.

In the end, by pushing for a cleaner UI for the NPB and navigation, designers crafted a more elegant space that enabled others at Spotify to build more without adding more.

So how did the team behind the new NPB free up space? Here are the small but mighty changes you may have noticed in the app. 

Adding transparency 

With the new transparent tab bar and floating NPB, there’s more opportunity for listeners to scroll, explore, discover content they can enjoy. 

Aligning home, search, and Your Library Headers

Aligning the text style of the header sections across tabs and creating a consistent placement for tab specific actions.

While this first phase is primarily cosmetic, it sets us up for bigger changes that will roll out soon, while making the product feel more lightweight. So, in the near future, you can expect to experience all the benefits of greater functionality but with much less clutter. 

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.

Updated by Adam Gorden on Nov 18, 2021 3:07 PM.

What’s the best way to stream Spotify songs while you’re working or concentrating on something important on your computer? A Spotify mini player could be the choice. You can either skip through songs or play and stop the song currently playing on a Spotify mini player, which helps you to change a song without going back to the desktop app.

But there is no Spotify pop out player provided by Spotify officially. Users of Spotify used to require this feature. But considering there might not be many users to use mini player, Spotify doesn’t bother to implement it. So users who genuinely need this can only get it on their own. You might want to directly adjust the Spotify API to make it smaller to look like a mini player, but the minimum size of the interface still covers a pretty huge proportion on the screen. But there still are ways to get one.

Today, I will show you how to get Spotify mini player on your computer and get the best Spotify listening experience.

Get Spotify Mini Player on Windows 10

The official Spotify desktop app doesn’t offer a mini player, but you can get it on your computer in several ways, here’s how.

1. Get Spotify Mini Player on Chrome

Chrome is not only a mighty web browser, but also can be a great Spotify music player. Spotify provides web player for both free and Premium to access Spotify music which is way easier than installing the desktop app. And you can get a mini player on web player.

1. Open Chrome and type in open.spotify.com to get Spotify web player.

2. Sign in to your Spotify account and play a song, then click on the mini player icon next to the album art to open Spotify mini player.

3. A small window with the album art will pop up and be pinned to the front of the screen. You can play, pause or skip through songs using this mini player.

2. Lofi Spotify Mini Player

Lofi is a compact desktop client that can play Spotify songs with a window that only takes up 150X150 pixels of the screen. Go to lofi.rocks to download the app and log in with your Spotify account. Then you can play, stop, skip forwards and backwards in its tiny interface displays with album artwork. It also creates visualizations, you can choose one among Blue Wave, Rainbow Road, String Theory and seascape.

Get Spotify Mini Player on Mac

1. Alfred Spotify Mini Player

Alfred Spotify Mini Player is a mighty tool that can control almost everything you can do on Spotify. To get started, you’ll have to download the workflow and set it up. It might be a little tricky for those who haven’t done this kind of setup before, but if you’re patient enough, you can explore many things out of this tool.

2. Spotify MiniPlay

This app can show what’s currently playing on Spotify. You can control Spotify playback and adjust the sound volume on this app, and you no more need to switch to Spotify. Full-sized album artwork will be shown on this app and you can view what’s playing right now in notification center.

How to Use Default Music Player as Spotify Mini Player

The methods mentioned above are all eligible to get Spotify mini player, but they also have shortcomings. Spotify mini player on Chrome can only stream songs in 192kbps and local files on Spotify can not be played on web player as well. Third-party Spotify mini players all require a Premium account to get an unlimited song skipping feature, or else there’ll be many ads pop up in the middle of the song.

But there’s a workaround to play Spotify songs without Premium and with the same feature as a mini player. And you can even use the default music player to work as a Spotify desktop mini player. With the ViWizard Spotify Music Converter, you can download Spotify songs to MP3 or other popular formats. You can put these songs in a media player on your computer and use the mini player feature to play Spotify songs without Premium.

Benefits of Converting Spotify Before Using Spotify Mini Player

• • You do not need a Spotify subscription
• • You can listen to Spotify songs with higher quality - 320Kbps
• • You can save Spotify songs forever
• • You can listen to Spotify music on other devices
• • Enjoy Spotify songs without ads

ViWizard Spotify Music Converter is designed to convert Spotify audio files into 6 different formats such as MP3, AAC, M4A, M4B, WAV, and FLAC. This tool can run at up to 5X faster speed to convert Spotify songs, almost 100% of the original song quality will be kept after converting process. All the converted songs can be played on any media player on your computer.

1Launch ViWizard and Import Songs from Spotify

Open ViWizard software and Spotify will be launched simultaneously. Then drag and drop tracks from Spotify into the ViWizard interface.

2 Set Up Output Parameters

After adding music tracks from Spotify to ViWizard, you can choose the output audio format. There're six options including MP3, M4A, M4B, AAC, WAV and FLAC. And then you can adjust the audio quality by selecting the output channel, bit rate, and sample rate.

3 Start the Conversion

Once all the setting is finished, click the "Convert" button to start loading Spotify music tracks. After the conversion, all the files will be saved to your specified folder. You could browse all the converted songs by clicking "Converted" and navigating to the output folder.

Video Tutorial: How to Use ViWizard to Convert Spotify Music

On Windows:

Open Groove Music and play a song downloaded from Spotify, then click on "Play in mini view" button to open the mini player.

On Mac:

1. Open the Music app on Mac. Transfer the song you downloaded from Spotify to Music.

2. Play the song and tap Window > Switch to MiniPlayer. Then you can listen to Spotify songs with Music MiniPlayer on Mac.

3. You can tap the lyrics button to see the lyrics of the playing song.

4. When you want to leave the mini mode, simply choose the Close button.

Conclusion

To use mini player to listen to Spotify music, you have various choices, such as Spotify MiniPlay, Lofi Spotify Mini Player. But if you use third-party mini players to play Spotify, it is necessary to own a Spotify Premium account. And the audio quality will be not good. So the better solution is to convert Spotify songs at first, then use the default music player with a mini player on your computer to play Spotify songs.

Adam Gorden is an experienced writer of ViWizard who is obsessed about tech, movie and software.