Smallify

Many good things can be said about the Spotify desktop app, but it does lack some important features, such as a miniature version of the player that can be used to manage playback without bringing up the main UI.

Thankfully, third-party applications like Smallify can provide you with an alternative. It is a small, open-source utility that lets you control playback from a minimalistic desktop player, while also unobtrusively displaying album art.

As you can see from the screenshots, the player features a very simple design, with no unnecessary UI elements such as a title bar. It can be resized freely and moved to any position on your screen, so it should be easy to integrate it with your desktop theme.

By right-clicking the UI, you can choose from one of the three player modes and specify whether or not the application should be displayed on top of all other windows. However, it does not seem to be possible to hide it from the Taskbar.

Depending on how much desktop space you have to spare, or how unobtrusive you want Smallify to be, you can select the most suitable player mode from the right-click menu.

The application can simply display the album art, with the progress bar and controls on top, or a smaller, bar-like UI that also shows the song name and artist. Alternatively, it is possible to hide everything else and just keep the playback controls.

In the future, we would like to see more customization options added, as users might want to change the player’s color theme or tweak the look of the playback controls. Also, it would be great if the program could be hidden from the Taskbar.

On the whole, however, Smallify is a pretty impressive application that Spotify users should definitely look out for. It makes it much easier to manage playback, and it displays useful information while staying very unobtrusive.