Spotify users (who haven’t switched due to the onslaught of AI slop in playlists) looking for yet another way to control playback from the Ubuntu top bar are… Not short of options, to be honest.
I’ve covered a variety of panel applets, desktop widgets and other doohickeys which do similar things to this one – they all use MPRIS, the freedesktop spec that lets media players share playback info with other apps and accept commands (skip, pause, etc) from them.
But if you’ve tried those other options and found they never quite hit the spot, gSpotify might.
gSpotify GNOME Shell Extension
There are some neat things that help gSpotify stand out from other music playback n’ now playing info applets.
For one, gSpotify does more than simply show the name of the streaming track: it can download it too — if a specific command-line tool (that I won’t point anyone in the direction of for fear of being seen to encourage anything untoward) is installed locally.
Secondly, this thing is a little richer in visuals.
gSpotify pulls the dominant colour from album artwork and uses it to tint the applet’s background. Gimmicky? A bit. Fun? Very. If you find that distracting, it can be disabled in the settings.
Finally, interactivity. Play/pause is not controlled using a(n obvious) button in the applet UI itself. Instead, you click the album cover to toggle playback. You can also click on the track title to copy it to your clipboard to paste elsewhere.
At the bottom are a row of buttons to: toggle shuffle, switch focus to the Spotify app (or restore it if minimised), the aforementioned thing I’m going to gloss over, and a button to open the extension’s settings panel:
Side note: I love when applets include a button for opening their settings directly.
Inside of that settings dialog is a small yet focused set of options. You can change the panel position (far left, left center, right, far right), toggle the introduction text, and control the artwork colour feature. That’s it – and arguably all there needs to be.
Visually, gSpotify’s layout is delightfully modern (‘curves in all the right places’, if I was being flirty) and it reminds me of lock-screen media controllers found on the iPhone (that’s no bad thing). If there is a flaw it’s the applet width shifting to fit track title on skip:
Functionally, gSpotify is tied to Spotify. That is a trade-off if you use other Linux music players (local or streaming) and want one controller. Yet for heavy Spotify users that’s arguably a pro point in using it: it’s less generic, more specific.
If you like what you see, gSpotify is available to install from the GNOME Extensions website. It works on GNOME 47, 48 and 49 (so you can’t use this on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as that uses GNOME 46).