The play/pause button on the Stream Deck changes with a thumbnail showing the album cover of the track that’s currently playing, which is a nice touch. However, they can still come in very handy when you’ve got a full-screen app open on your Mac (such as a game) and you want to control the music playing in the background.

They are fairly basic controls: play/pause/back/forward/toggle shuffle plus basic volume controls. The Stream Deck has a Spotify plugin that provides a range of controls without you having to program them manually. It’s a dashboard of tactile, customizable buttons that can be used to control pretty much any app on your Mac (or Windows PC for that matter). The Elgato Stream Deck is one of my favorite pieces of kit. My Stream Deck with various Spotify shortcuts, including links to favorite playlists Barry Collins

You can add songs to playlists directly from the Mini-Player, you can follow/unfollow artists, you can kickstart Spotify Radio playlists for particular artists, and you can easily access all your saved tracks, albums and playlists from the interface, complete with artwork.Īlfred has a million and one other uses, but the Spotify Mini-Player is right up there with my top reasons to install it. There are tons of power features in the Alfred Spotify Mini-Player too.

Once installed, you can fire up the Alfred Spotify Mini-Player with a keyboard combo (mine is Ctrl + Command + S) and you’ve got a hugely convenient way to search for songs, albums and playlists without having to open Spotify itself, helping you to keep screen focus on what you’re doing.Īs you can see from the screenshot above, everything can be done with keyboard shortcuts, so you can quickly change song, album or playlist without having to take your fingers off the keyboard. You’ll need to be comfortable with entering Terminal commands to get this thing working, but there is a step-by-step installation guide on the link above. You’ll need the Powerpack to install the free Spotify Mini-Player workflow for Alfred. It’s a fabulously powerful app, especially when you buy the Powerpack for $42 (£34). Play songs, albums or playlists without opening the Spotify app Barry CollinsĪlfred is a well-known Mac app that could be described as Spotlight search on steroids.

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