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Music fans are plenty familiar with Spotify, the online streaming service that lets users listen to millions of songs on-demand for free or with a no-advertisement subscription.
However, with Spotify’s myriad settings and apps that extend its functionality, you might not be using it to its full potential. Here, TIME rounds up 8 tips that will help users see Spotify in a whole new light:
Hide Your Guilty Pleasures From Friends
The ability to follow friends’ musical habits is one of Spotify’s best features. But maybe you don’t want everyone to know exactly how many times you listened to “All About That Bass” this summer.
In April 2018, news broke that Google had quietly updated its Family Link app to work on Chrome OS, according to Chrome Unboxed. Parents were provided with a new, albeit limited way to stop. The web player stopped working in Chrome for me today. Looks like Spotify are trying to load insecure content whilst on HTTPS so Chrome is blocking × Close We.
On the desktop version, you can select “Private Session” from the main Spotify menu to stop broadcasting your musical selections for a certain period (the same setting is found on the “social” menu within settings on the mobile version). To permanently stop sharing your listening choices, go to the “Spotify” menu, then “Preferences,” and uncheck the boxes for “Share my activity and what I listen to with my followers on Spotify” and “Share my activity and what I listen to on Facebook.”
Improve Your Search Queries
Navigating Spotify’s massive catalogue can be a chore. Next time, try using qualifiers to narrow your search. They work much in the same way as Google search queries. You can specify searches based on artist, title, genre or year. So if you’re looking for just Jay-Z’s output in 1997, “Jay-Z year:1997” to pull up the desired results. Here’s a full list of the search qualifiers you can use on Spotify.
READ MORE Spotify Now Makes Playlists Based On What Your Friends Listen To
Use Folders to Organize Your Music
One criticism of Spotify is that people’s music collections often devolve into a jumble of playlists and favorites songs. Consider using folders to provide more order for your playlists. On the desktop app, go to “File” and then “New Playlist Folder” to create a new folder. Then you can place any playlists you like within the new folder.
Toggle High-Quality Streaming On or Off
Spotify Premium users have the option to enable “high-quality streaming” from the Preferences menu on the desktop, which plays songs at a bitrate of 320 kbps rather than the standard rate of 160 kbps — making everything sound better.
On mobile, songs automatically play at a lower bitrate of 96 kbps to conserve data. All users can bump that figure up to 160 kbps, and premium users can also use the 320 kbps setting. Just be careful, since a higher bitrate will eat into your mobile data plan faster.
Add Songs That Aren’t on Spotify And Listen to Them Offline
Spotify’s catalogue is hardly comprehensive, but users can easily add songs from outside sources to their libraries and listen to them within the Spotify interface. Simply go to Preferences and enable showing tracks from local sources. Those sources can include iTunes, the Downloads folder on your computer, or specific folders that you select.
Even better, if you have a playlist filled with non-Spotify songs and toggle on the “Available Offline” option at the top of the playlist, you can download the songs to your phone for offline listening.
See the Lyrics to Every Song
Trying to prep for your next karaoke session? Turn on the musiXmatch app (you can find it in the “App Finder” tab on the left-hand sidebar) and you can see the lyrics of most songs as they’re playing within Spotify. There are lots of other handy apps in the “App Finer” menu, including recommendation apps that offer features like curated music lists from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone.
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Add a Visualizer
If you miss the cheesy visualizers from your days using Windows Media Player or Winamp, Spotify has you covered. In the search bar, just type in “spotify:app:visualizer” to bring up a range of different visual options that will play in time with your tunes.
Link to a Specific Part of a Song
Want to send a friend “Free Bird,” but skip the pretenses and get right to the guitar solo? Spotify makes that pretty simple. If you’re sharing the URL of a song (a special kind of Spotify-specific link that only works within the Spotify app), add a “#” sound to the end of the character string and then the timestamp you want to zoom to. To get to the “Free Bird” solo at 4 minutes and 25 seconds into the song, for example, you’d write this: spotify:track:1xt1TX045OgURfw0MAcVNF#4:25.
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EDIT POSTWith a lot of focus lately on how smartphone app developers are treated on Apple's and Google's app stores, Google has decided right now is a great time to announce more stringent app store billing rules. A new post from the official Android Developer Blog promises a crackdown on in-app billing that sounds like it's targeted at big streaming services like Netflix and Spotify.
Spotify And Google Links Dont Work On Chrome Apps
Google's post really beats around the bush trying to sugar-coat this announcement, but it starts off by saying, 'We’ve always required developers who distribute their apps on Play to use Google Play’s billing system if they offer in-app purchases of digital goods, and pay a service fee from a percentage of the purchase.' This rule has not been enforced, though, and a lot of big developers have just ignored Google's billing requirements. Today, Netflix and Spotify don't use Google's in-app billing and instead kick new accounts out to a Web browser, where the companies can use PayPal or direct credit card processing to dodge Google's 30-percent fees.
'We have clarified the language in our Payments Policy to be more explicit that all developers selling digital goods in their apps are required to use Google Play’s billing system,' Google continues. 'For those who already have an app on Google Play that requires technical work to integrate our billing system, we do not want to unduly disrupt their roadmaps and are giving a year (until September 30, 2021) to complete any needed updates.'That's basically the meat of the blog post: everybody needs to use Google billing by this time next year. A look at the 'Payments Policy' shows examples like 'subscription services' that offer things like 'music' and 'video.' It also warns readers at the top that 'changes are coming to this policy!' and that 'any existing app that is currently using an alternative billing system will need to remove it to comply with this update.'
Advertisement Google draws a clear distinction between Android and iOS by pointing out that on Android, developers have a 'choice of stores' and that most Android devices ship with multiple app stores. Google mentions twice that 'each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features' with the implication being that if developers want to be on Google Play, which has 2 billion active users, they're going to have to start following the rules or look elsewhere.
Better third-party app store support in Android 12?
One other tidbit in this post is news of an Android 12 feature: 'We will be making changes in Android 12 (next year’s Android release) to make it even easier for people to use other app stores on their devices while being careful not to compromise the safety measures Android has in place. We are designing all this now and look forward to sharing more in the future!'
Currently, installing a second app store requires a few extra checkboxes, but given that stepping outside of Google's walled garden really does expose users to more threats, the two warning messages don't seem excessive. Google regularly publishes stats comparing the malware rate of Google Play-only devices versus devices that have installed apps from outside the Play Store. While Google Play is by no means perfect, Google is one of the few app store operators big enough to put every app through some kind of vetting process, and as a result, users have been anywhere from 5 to 10 times more likely to get malware outside the Play Store than inside it for the past two years.
The current app store install process is not that arduous. If you're downloading something like F-Droid (an open source app store), first Chrome will give you a warning that this type of file (an APK) can harm your device, which you can click through. If you've never installed an app from the browser before, you'll be forwarded to the device settings so you can flip the 'allow installs from source' checkbox for Chrome. Then you can install the app store. Android requires any app that installs apps to be given the 'install unknown apps' checkbox, so you'll also need to flip this setting to allow the new app store to install apps.
Advertisement This move to make third-party app stores easier to use makes a bit more sense as a response to Fortnite's developer, Epic, which is currently suing Google over its alternative app store policies. 'Directly downloading Fortnite on an Android device can involve a dozen steps, requiring the user to change default settings and bravely click through multiple dire warnings,' Epic's antitrust lawsuit reads. 'And even if a persistent user manages to install a competing app store, Google prevents such stores from competing on equal footing with the Google Play Store by blocking them from offering basic functions, such as automatic updating of apps in the background.'Like any lawsuit, Epic's filing is a bit blustery. By my count, installing a third-party app store takes five taps, not 'a dozen steps.' While any pre-installed app store (in the locked-down system partition) can install app updates, Epic is right that user-downloaded app stores can't automatically update apps. Letting downloaded apps install new code in the background without user consent sounds just a little scary, but maybe Google could add a highly privileged 'app store' permission for downloaded apps to make companies like Epic happy. Epic also says it doesn't like 'dire warnings' attached to these permissions either, though, and correctly informing users of how powerful an app store permission would be would require a pretty scary-sounding warning. Epic was already caught irresponsibly using these powers once, when the Fortnight Installer opened up Samsung devices to a security vulnerability.