NowPlaying

The Spotify desktop application is quite well designed, but it does lack some features that one would expect from a Windows client, such as the ability to display information about the currently played song on the desktop.

NowPlaying is an open-source program created to address this issue. It keeps an eye on what Spotify is playing and displays the name, artist and album art of the current song on the desktop.

The program doesn’t need to be installed before use, so you can just unpack the archive and launch it from any location on your PC. Nothing needs to be configured, and you can close it from the system tray icon at any time.

Naturally, Spotify needs to be installed and running in order to use this application, but you can leave it minimized to the system tray even when you have shut down the Spotify desktop client.

NowPlaying continuously checks what is being played in Spotify, and it displays each song’s title, artist and album art in a small window on the desktop. The window can be moved freely, and it stays on top of every other application.

Unfortunately, though, no customization options are available. You can’t resize the widget, alter its transparency or configure it to remain in the background instead of being displayed on top of all other windows.

It would have been great if there was an option to display the song info only for a few seconds when a new track starts, and then hide the notification.

For the time being, NowPlaying offers a very limited feature lineup, but we did not run into any bugs during our tests. This is a very early release, so it is likely that new features are planned for the future, which is why you may want to keep an eye on this project.