Swervify

If you’re not willing to pay for a Spotify Premium subscription, having audio ads interrupt your music can get quite annoying, and even the relatively unobtrusive banner advertisements shown by the desktop client bother some users.

Swervify is a portable, open-source application that can improve your Spotify experience if you are using the free edition of the service. It can mute audio ads when they are played, block ad banners in the client’s UI and even skip spotlight videos automatically.

Those who have used Spotify Free know that it occasionally plays both targeted ads and reminders to try out the Premium edition. Listening to them can get tiring, but there is, of course, no way to skip them.

Swervify offers an interesting solution – it does not skip the ads entirely, since this is not possible, but it mutes Spotify for the duration of the advertisement, restoring the volume back to its normal level when the next song begins.

While most users don’t generally mind them too much, the banner ads displayed by Spotify can be quite distracting. Swervify can hide them or prevent them from being displayed altogether, thus cleaning up the UI. It is worth noting that the smaller banners are still displayed, though their contents are blacked out.

Another optional feature also makes it possible to skip all Spotlight and music videos in your playlists, moving to the next song automatically.

You can view information about the current song in the main window, but most users will probably just minimize the program after setting it up. It runs in the system tray, and you can also configure it to be launched automatically upon startup.

Swervify also has the advantage of being portable, as it does not require installation and stores all its data in the application folder. However, you will need administrative rights to enable the banner blocking feature.

In short, Swervify is a great tool for any Spotify Free user, as it gets rid of some of the annoyances in the non-paid edition, while being unobtrusive and very intuitive. If you’re looking for a simple, reliable way to block Spotify ads, you should definitely try it out.