Spotifycontrol brings some much-needed external controls and notifications to Spotify

Spotify, the (European) king of music-on-demand, is a real pain in the ass to actually use. I mean, it works, but only just. It's one of those annoying apps that minimises itself to your system tray -- and while that might be OK with Windows XP, on Windows 7 that's just crap. I want Spotify on my SUPERBAR! I want the ability to stop, start and change tracks without having to dig Spotify out of my system tray! Fortunately, Spotifycontrol does just that... and it's open-source!

It's not ideal -- really, I just want that Spotify icon on my Superbar to become 'active' -- but Spotifycontrol is a monumentally large step in the right direction. First, it lets you control Spotify (duh), and the control bar is always-on-top, so you'll never lose it. Second, it's integrated into Aero, so it's all translucent and pretty (it also pops up notifications when the track changes). Third, it exposes global hotkeys so you can control Spotify with your keyboard! AND FINALLY -- it has a built-in lyric search! Just hit that icon that looks like a text document... and blam! Lyrics!

There haven't been any updates to the project since the beginning of April, but seemingly they are currently working on a Web-based control server. There might also be a small memory leak: the memory footprint keeps climbing until you move Spotifycontrol -- still, mere teething issues... and we have gigabytes of RAM for a reason, right?

Tags: api, app, control, keyboard, music, open source, OpenSource, spotify