MiniPie

The Spotify desktop application offers a pretty impressive array of features, but the player isn’t exactly unobtrusive. Unless your keyboard is equipped with multimedia keys, there is no easy way to manage playback without bringing up the main UI.

MiniPie is a neat application that enables you to control your music via a small desktop widget, which also displays album art. It can improve your listening experience and is remarkably simple to configure.

Before anything else, it is worth remembering that this is not a standalone client, as it requires Spotify to be installed and running in order to play your music. Once you’ve started playing a track, this application will detect it and allow you to manage playback.

A few of the program’s advanced features require you to log in to your Spotify account, which can be done fairly easily. If you don’t need these features, this step is optional.

MiniPie allows you to play or pause the current track, as well as skip to the next or previous one. The controls are only displayed while hovering over the program window so as not to cover up the album art.

What’s more, you can control the volume, add songs to your collection, send them to various playlists or share them with others. Some of these actions can also be performed with customizable global hotkeys.

The player should look great on your desktop, but it would have helped if it were possible to customize its appearance. At the very least, users should be able to resize the player.

Overall, MiniPie is a well-designed mini player for Spotify, though it does need some small improvements. If you are looking for a new way to manage playback, you should definitely give this application a try.