Spotube

Spotify has brought about a new way for people to listen to their favorite songs. There's no mistaking that the music streaming platform has nailed the formula, with much of its popularity also being owed to convenience.

What if you wanted a more lightweight Spotify client, though? The desktop solution is not too resource-intensive, but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. Spotube aims to provide a lightweight alternative that streams your music from YouTube, requiring no Premium account.

The installation itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but getting the app fully up and running involves fetching some Spotify developer credentials, which can be accessed from your Dashboard. Upon logging in, elect to Create an App, name it appropriately and give it a description, then click Show Client Secret. Copy the ID and Secret values, and paste them into Spotube.

This will then log you into the app, and you can go from there. Your account credentials are safe and won't be shared with the program, so there's nothing to worry about.

The interface is intuitive, so users shouldn't have any problems navigating through the app. The main screen contains the Featured playlists from Spotify, containing the most popular songs of the day. There's a Search function, and the songs from your library are also recognized. There's also a Lyrics feature, and users will have to introduce their Genius account for it to function.

The songs you liked on your Spotify account will appear in the Library tab, and you can stream them directly from there. As the program streams the music off YouTube, some mismatching may occur: for instance, instead of playing one of our songs, the app played a YouTube review of that track. In addition to that, prompting to search something would return a blank screen, effectively not allowing us to look up anything.

Spotube is an interesting alternative to the Spotify client, but it has its issues. It can feel clunky to use at times, and the bugs can spoil the party. Still, it's not uncommon for such issues to prop up in early development, so things can only go up from here.