Apple Music is giving me jip at the moment, beachballing and freezing, so I'm giving Spotify another spin for a while. I'll be switching back soon I'm sure, but for now, I've immediately come up against the need to tame the UI chaos.
Customising the Spotify web player is one option - if you know a bit of CSS you can bend things to your will to an extent. The drawback for me is the web player can't detect Spotify Connect speakers like my Sonos, only the desktop app can do that. Fortunately, I came across Spicetify, a command line app that customises Spotify Desktop. This can inject user.css, as well as make other tweaks via javascript. If you want a keyboard shortcut to immediately jump to 'the drop', you can do that.
To replace the new Spotify brand font, I've used one of my favourite typefaces, Söhne by Klim Type Foundry. You can even download demo fonts which you can use locally. I'm surprised at how much of a difference it makes to me, it's just so much more refined, calmer. While large UI scale changes aren't worth the effort, I can hide ‘Podcasts' and 'Audiobooks’ from the top of the sidebar so that I can see ‘Albums' and 'Artists' without having to do that weird horizontal scrolly thing.
My Spicetify user.css, such as it is, is as follows:
/* Change the UI font */
:root {
--encore-title-font-stack: "Söhne", "Test Söhne", "Aktiv Grotesk", system-ui, sans-serif !important;
--encore-body-font-stack: "Söhne", "Test Söhne", "Aktiv Grotesk", system-ui, sans-serif !important;
}
/* Make main headings not _quite_ so heavy */
.encore-text-headline-large {
font-weight: 700 !important;
}
/* Hide Elements */
/* Podcasts in sidebar menu */
.J4qD2RoZgGLbOdpfs63w button:nth-of-type(2),
/* Audiobooks in sidebar menu */
.J4qD2RoZgGLbOdpfs63w button:nth-of-type(3) {
display: none !important;
}
Obviously, with each release there's a chance that the markup will change, so there'll always be a bit of cat and mouse. If you want to use your front end skills to do a bit of UI hackery, I highly recommend enabling devtools to enable you to inspect the markup.
Update 23rd June: Scrub that, Fuck Spotify. Every time I start to think about using it again, Ek gives more reasons not to.