Spotify Web Keyboard Shortcuts

[Antionette Eastin]

Spotifypopularized the streaming music revolution, and it's still going strong as one of the best streaming services today. Whether you stick with the Free offering or have upgraded to Premium, you can streamline your listening experience by learning Spotify's keyboard shortcuts.

Since it's a simple app, Spotify doesn't have as many shortcuts as more expansive software like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. But if you're an avid listener, integrating these keyboard shortcuts into your daily routine should help you get more out of Spotify.

FREE DOWNLOAD: This cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a short form to access it for the first time only. Download the Ultimate Spotify Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet.

The above keyboard shortcuts only work when Spotify is the app on your computer currently in focus. If you're using another program, you can't use the convenient shortcuts to play/pause, skip a track, change the volume, and similar.

However, don't forget about the media keys on your keyboard! All Mac keyboards and many Windows keyboards have keys that let you adjust the volume, play/pause, and change tracks. They're the easiest way to make a quick change without swapping back to Spotify.

If you use Windows 10 or 11, a popup will appear every time you use these keys, which you may find annoying. In Spotify, go to Edit > Preferences and disable Show desktop overlay when using media keys to stop that popup from appearing.

With these shortcuts and tips, you're all set to get more out of Spotify than ever before. Keep these shortcuts in mind next time you're swapping tracks or making a new playlist, and you'll accomplish them without your hands leaving the keyboard.

Don't worry - it's quick and painless! Just click below, and once you're logged in we'll bring you right back here and post your question. We'll remember what you've already typed in so you won't have to do it again.

This was not helpful in the slightest. You guys have had this problem for years and if I worked at Spotify I could fix the API in l 30 seconds, you **bleep**ing suck at user interface**bleep** just proves everyone at spotify uses apple music.

With old Mac keyboards volume up and volume down and also a few more buttons just switched my song. I can use Spotify and my keyboard! It is so annoying. Please give me the ability to disable this feature.

Spotify has taken over my mouse controls (Back/Forward) and (ScrollWheel/mouse button 3) for its disruptive start/pausing and changing music functionality. Now I can't even use it alongside other applications.

Hello,

It's probably a duplicate of Forward and back keyboard shortcut feature no longer working on Mac, but I cannot longer use Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow to change tracks on Linux.

Same here on Manjaro 21.1.2 Pahvo with XFCE, I am still able to use shortcuts like ctrl+a to select all songs in a playlist and ctrl+s and ctrl+r to control shuffle and repeat but unable to use ctrl+arrowkey to skip or control volume. Shift+left and shift+right seems to also still be working for scrubbing a track.

I use global keyboard shortcuts to skip and pause/play, which have worked perfectly fine so far and work on the new versions too. You choose a keyboard shortcut to bind the commands to, and the commands themselves look like this (admittedly long)

Thanks for your suggestion, but I just expect Spotify to fix the issue on their end. They introduced a regression by breaking a couple of keyboard shortcuts, they should not expect us to fix this issue by ourselves.

It looks like the issue with arrow keys is not platform-specific, as I see Windows users also being unable to scroll with up/down arrows and change tracks. Those same issues are present in the web player as well.

I'm on Windows 10 64 bit, Using spotify desktop free version. Is there a way to create keyboard Spotify shortcuts to pause/play and skip tracks, while outside Spotify? I don't want to keep opening it. I might be browsing or coding, I need quick shortcuts.

Try Toastify. From the website: "Toastify adds some missing functionallity to the Spotify client(Windows only). It shows a popup, toast style, dialog on track change and it allows you to use global hot keys for Play/Pause, Next, Previous etc." I've used it before to add hotkeys in Windows 7 and 8, works pretty well.

I am on Ubuntu 16.04, I cannot play, pause, go to the next or the previous song in spotify. There are many answers but most are complicated, is there a simple solution that doesn't require a command line?

Once you validate the above commands, feel free to add them as Key Shortcut. For Ubuntu, "Settings > Devices > Keyboard" than add (+) and put the name and copy the commands, than put the keyboard shortcut.

There is a simple solution credit goes to this thread on Spotify forum, Thanks to schuellerf and rszabla. The solution is pretty simple and works on any Linux distribution.

The top-voted solutions are about adding a custom key mapping, which is kinda cumbersome, as you have to drop every other binding related to the Play/Pause key.

There's only one binding possible for a key so it means that your Play/Pause key stops working anywhere outside Spotify.

Initially, I wanted to do that, but Ubuntu settings didn't let me create a binding so the key was used/captured by something else on my system.It turned out that Chrome captures hardware media keys by default :)

You can disable this functionality by opening

chrome://flags/

and then disabling

Hardware Media Key Handling feature.

Here at Lifehacker we're big fans of keyboard shortcuts, whether it's for your operating system, your web browser, or any of your web apps. They help you get more done in a shorter period of time, without having to lift your fingers from the keyboard or shift your gaze from whatever you're looking at (if your muscle memory is fully trained).

You can actually find keyboard shortcuts in more places than you might have realized, and that includes desktop and web apps for Windows and macOS. Sure, the desktop clients are easy enough to use without them, but when you need to skip a song or lower the volume, they can be really helpful.

We're going to mention some of our favorite ones for Spotify here, but you can see a full list by pressing Ctrl+? (Windows) or Cmd+? (macOS). Most shortcuts are the same across both operating systems, if you use Cmd in place of Ctrl (or vice versa), and they should work fine in both the desktop client and the web app player.

I recently got an ergonomic Sculpt keyboard that I use with my Macbook. I managed to configure some handy keyboard shortcuts for e.g. moving between screens but I'm failing miserably at configuring "Next" and "Previous" buttons to use with Spotify.

I tried first Karabiner but it's apparently missing both options. So I started digging in keyboard settings. In Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts I'm able to add manually a new shortcut for moving to the next song. And it works but only when I'm on the screen with Spotify. But the whole point of this shortcut is to switch between songs while doing something else, without even looking at Spotify app. And that I cannot configure somehow.

I've had the (mis)fortune to get a new work laptop with the O' so great Touch Bar which I so immensely hate and have changed the Touch Bar to display F-keys.

However one thing I do miss is my global Media Keys. I'm primarily listen to Spotify and I know it has shortcuts but that requires me to make the Spotify window active which it rarely is.

First, you can write some AppleScripts that will perform the actions Next, Prev., and Play/Pause. I found some examples here. If you are on macOS Catalina, you will need to replace "iTunes" with "Music", unless you only use Spotify and don't want to check for other open applications.

For each AppleScript (Next, Prev, Play/Pause), you can either save it as an application, and set the service to open that application, or you can have your service run the AppleScript directly by using the Run AppleScript variable in Automator.

Now that you have 3 services, you can go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Services. You can now set a keyboard shortcut to run each service, which in turn should run the AppleScript to perform the Media Action you want. The services you just made should be in the General section, which is at the very bottom of the list for me.

On Ventura, you can do this all within the Shortcuts app. Launch it, then search for "pause", and assign the "Run with" keyboard shortcut you want. You also won't need to select Finder anymore; you can instead leave Services Menu as the default checked item. Here's what it looks like when you're done in Shortcuts:

What ended up working was installing Karabiner-Elements. Without any extra configuration, now pressing i.e. F8 works to play_or_pause, and other keys work as expected for next/prev and volume controls.

Everything in @beninato's answer worked for me. The only thing I had trouble with was that when setting the keyboard shortcut for the services I created, it had to include the command key for the service to be run by the shortcut.

I spent the last hour trying to set the easiest and most reliable way to create a keyboard shortcut for Spotifys Add to Queue functionality on OS X. Since I found no solution for this I decided to post it here.

There is no menu bar entry for this functionality in Spotify and therefore no way to use an ApplyScript. I had to simulate mouse clicks to get this done. There exists a range of different tools to set keyboard shortcuts, but I personally prefer BetterTouchToul from Andreas Hegenberg.

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