Fill Your Head with Tunes: Using Spotify with Alfred Workflows
Over the past few weeks, we featured a few of the apps we really love using with Alfred. While working on each one of these posts, I was listening to music using the service I'm featuring today: Spotify.
To say that we use Spotify a lot would probably be an understatement. At the end of 2013, Spotify released a "Your year in review" page, where you could see some mind blowing aggregate stats for its millions of users, the year's most popular Monday songs, as well as some of your own usage metrics. Ahem, it turns out that we listened to over 30 non-stop days of Spotify music over 2013.
It's fair to say that Spotify pretty much fuels our week musically. Some clever Alfred users created workflows that gives you control of Spotify on your Mac. There are a number of great workflows, and below are two popular ones; a simpler one and a more advanced one, depending on how you like your workflows!
Remember that you'll need a Powerpack license in order to use workflows.
A Simple Workflow: Spotifious
Spotifious by Ben Stolovitz is a great yet simple workflow that allows you to search and browse music on Spotify. Once you've set your hotkey, you can bring it up to see what's currently playing and browse Spotify's catalog.
It's brilliant and requires no setup at all, other than using an up-to-date version of the Spotify app for Mac. The only downside is that searching can only be as fast as Spotify can respond to your query, so you sometimes have to wait a moment before your results appear.
Download the Spotifious workflow from Packal.
An Advanced Workflow: Spotify Mini Player
This workflow is Vincent de Saboulin's Spotify Mini Player and gives you an even smoother search experience for your Spotify playlists, including showing artwork thumbnails as you browse.
It requires a bit of legwork to get started as you'll need to sign up for a (free) Spotify developer account, but once you're up and running, it's the quickest and prettiest way to search. After setting up the workflow, it took roughly an hour for my library to be scanned and the artwork to be downloaded, but the results were beautifully presented and very fast.
Download the Spotify Mini Player workflow from Packal.
For those who can't use Spotify yet
As Spotify isn't available in all countries, those who are still waiting for the service to launch in their country can choose from the wealth of great workflows for other music services.
For example, users have created workflows for Last.fm and Rdio, and there is of course, Alfred's integrated iTunes Mini Player.
What's your favourite guilty pleasure song? If you tell me yours, maybe I'll tell you mine ;)
