I Tried Spicetify and It Took My Spotify Experience from Bland to Bangin’

Spotify has been my go-to music streaming service for nearly 6 years, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. It used to be good in the early days, but lately, they’ve started to show their true colors by ruining the free tier, forcing me to pay the premium for bare-bones features like song skips, lyrics, and using the darn seek bar. While I can’t do anything for the mobile app, there is a free tool called Spicetify that solves everything wrong with Spotify.

Spicetify lets me change the theme of the app and customize it like there’s no tomorrow. My editor, Ajaay, recently introduced me to this Spotify tool, and after using it, I can promise that I am hooked for life.

Unlocking Spotify’s True Potential: How to Install Spicetify on Your Desktop

Spicetify isn’t new to the scene, veteran Spotify users may already know about it. It’s an open-source CLI that works on top of the Spotify app on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The tool essentially adds a marketplace that includes a variety of extensions, themes, plugins, and apps. You can even remove all ads using it.

I know you’re already scrolling to find out how to install Spicetify on your desktop, so let me do the honors. It’s fairly simple, but I recommend you follow this guide to not repeat the same mistakes I did. The process below is for Windows, but Spicetify is also available for macOS and Linux.

1. Before we begin, make sure you don’t have the Spotify app from the Microsoft Store. To check this, go to the Spotify page in the store and see if it shows the “Open” option. If it does, uninstall the app and download it again, this time from Spotify (website).
2. Once you have the Spotify app installed, go to the Spicetify (website) and click on the Install button.

3. Here, click on the copy icon next to the command under Powershell (pre-built binary).

4. Now open the Start menu, and search for “Windows Powershell” and click on the Windows Powershell app to open it.

5. Now paste the Spicetify command here, and press the Enter key. You’ll need to wait as it gets installed.

6. Midway through the setup, it will ask whether you want to install Spicetify Marketplace. Type “Y” and press the Enter key to proceed.

Wait for the setup to complete and Spotify will relaunch itself. You’ll spot a new marketplace icon at the top, opening up the crazy world of customizations that Spicetify offers. Let’s check them out.

Note:

Spicetify automatically uninstalls every time you update the Spotify app. So you will need to back up your Spicetify customizations and re-install the tool again after every update.

Supercharging My Spotify Experience with Spicetify Extensions

When I first installed Spicetify, my curious brain headed over to the marketplace to see what tools I had at my disposal. The first tab that shows up is “Extensions”, and boy are there so many of them. From beautiful floating lyrics to no-foul-mouth songs, there’s something for everyone. You just need to click on the Install button and select Reload Now to get the extension.

I installed the Shuffle+ plugin from Spicetify’s library to remove bias when shuffling tracks. Now I can finally enjoy some good songs that don’t get to my ears as often because of Spotify’s dumb algorithm. The Beautiful Lyrics mod came next, which added floating lyrics that were highlighted as the music played over a gradient image of the album art. I never realized lyrics could look this aesthetic.

Finally, I installed Full App Display for full-screen music playback. A rather simple feature that you’d expect to be included in the standard app, but it isn’t. Since I have already sacrificed my credit card to Spotify and given in to the premium lifestyle, I didn’t go for the Adblockify extension. It removes all ads from the app, and if you use Spotify for free, you should download this right away.

Spicetify Themes Got Me Colored in Joy

After tackling the important extensions, I moved on to the Themes tab. That’s where the real fun started. Spicetify hosts such a huge library of themes that browsing through them left me in awe. I couldn’t believe that this was how I could make the dull Spotify client look like on my desktop. There are themes with different colors and transparency, and ones that give the app a retro look.

Installing themes is similar to how you install extensions. Simply press the Install button and select Reload now. I picked the Starry Night theme first as it added a somber animated sky in the background packed with twinkling stars. It even shifts the player from the bottom to the right sidebar and includes a rotating circular album art. Here’s what it looks like:

Aside from that, I tried some other Spicetify themes, such as OnePunch, which dresses up Spotify in yellow like Saitama from the anime. Bloom provides a glassmorphsim effect to the entire UI. There’s also WMPotify, which converts Spotify into a “Windows Media Player”.

While trying these, I learned some themes have color variations that can be changed from the Installed tab in the Marketplace. I picked the Cotton candy color for the Starry Night theme and never looked back since.

There’s More Fun Stuff You Can Do with Spicetify

We’re not done yet. Spicetify also includes Snippets which let you tweak or remove certain aspects of the app. With these, I can finally fix the issues in the Spotify desktop app layout that trigger my OCD. Like fixing the “DJ” icon to sit well with the UI, or swapping places of the right and left sidebars. But it isn’t all about fixing Spotify. You can also add a sleeping cat, or a twerking Among Us guy at the end of the seek bar for fun’s sake.

The App tab is the last one, and it includes a bunch of experimental and really out-there features that you can add to Spotify. Like the Visualizer app, Statistics which shows your Spotify stats, and my favorite, History in Sidebar. This one shows a list of all the songs you have played recently. While this feature is built into Spotify nowadays, this app adds an easy-to-access list to my listening history on Spotify.

Warning: Don’t Get Too Carried Away!

Having all these fun tools at my disposal made me a little too trigger-happy, and I ended up installing a lot. So much so that I quickly realized that these can take a toll on your system. Similar to a web browser, the more extensions you add, the more RAM it consumes. By the end, Spotify was taking up 2GB of RAM in my laptop. Plus I could see the app struggle to run, freezing at times too.

Just to let you know, my laptop specs are Intel Core i5 12500H, 16GB of RAM, and RTX 3050 GPU, and it was plugged in the whole time. So I wasn’t slouching in the performance department. I would suggest you choose your extensions wisely and only download what is necessary unless you have a beefy gaming rig.

My Spicetify Facelift is Complete, and I’m Never Going Back

Coming to the end, I am done with my Spotify app transformation, and satisfied with the result. The app looks more akin to what I always wanted to it look like. There’s a new, shiny theme to welcome me every day, and all the necessary features that I don’t think Spotify is ever going to add.

This is all thanks to Spicetify, and like I said in the beginning, I am hooked for life on this thing. Honestly, the amount of features, customizations, and tweaks it lets you do is unfathomable. Though, Spicetify does have its caveats, like how it starts taking up too many resources and doesn’t play with the modern Spotify theme. That said, I can’t recommend this tool enough and if you use the desktop client like I do, then I highly suggest you try it out.