Everyday Use
Playing music
Playlist, album, artist, and podcast pages have play buttons. Cards show one when you hover, and each row has its own. Double-click a row to start playback from that song within its playlist or album. The shuffle button next to a page’s play button starts the page in shuffled order.
An unfinished podcast episode continues from the saved place shown in its row. A finished or unstarted episode starts at the beginning. The active episode keeps its live position, and episodes played from a playlist keep that playlist’s queue and displayed order. This applies to supported Spotify playback; alternate local audio does not support podcast episodes.
The player bar shows what is playing locally or on another device. Click the title to open its album, an artist name to open that artist, or the plus to add the track to Liked Songs. Once it is there the plus becomes a filled check, and pressing that opens the Add to playlist sheet: a search, New playlist, then Liked Songs and the playlists you can edit, the ones already holding the song under Saved in with a check and the rest under Recently updated with an empty circle. Click rows to tick or untick them, Liked Songs included, and Done applies every change at once; Cancel drops them. Typing in the search highlights the first playlist that can take the song, Up and Down move the highlight, and Enter adds the song to it straight away. The same control sits in every track row and in the Now Playing view. While a song plays from a playlist you can edit, the bar’s right-click menu also offers Remove from this playlist. Drag the cover or title onto a playlist in Your Library, or between rows of an open playlist, to add it. The arrow in the cover’s corner, or the first button at the right of the bar, opens the Now Playing view: the cover large beside the page, the artist, and what is next in the queue. The queue, the lyrics, and the Now Playing view share that column, one at a time. The wheel over the volume slider moves it five percent at a time. When Spotify reports that a device cannot accept remote volume changes, volume and mute are disabled. Use that device’s own controls instead; keyboard and media-control volume commands are ignored for the same device.
Local Spotify playback keeps sample-rate conversion continuous between audio packets when the output uses a different rate, such as 48 kHz on Windows.
Home
The chips above Home choose what it shows: everything, music only, or your podcasts and saved episodes. The shortcuts under them are Liked Songs and the playlists you played last. Home previews your most-played songs; select Your top songs, Show all, or Show more top songs to open the complete ranked list.
Track tables sort by their column headings: click Title, Album, Date added, or the clock to sort by it, again to reverse, and a third time to return to the list’s own order. Sorted and filtered views are reused until the list, filter, sort, or contributor names change, rather than sorted again on every frame. The play button in Liked Songs follows the sorted view.
Your listening
Your listening, from the account menu at the top right or from Jump, sums up what you played: time listened, plays, different songs and artists, the songs, artists and albums you played most, a chart of plays by day or by month, and how many days in a row you have listened. Chips switch between the last 7 days, the last 30 days, the last 12 months and all time, counted in this computer’s time zone. A play is counted once a song has run for half a minute (half of a shorter song), on this computer, in a file under the state directory; the page’s Clear history forgets it. Nothing about it is sent anywhere.
Jump
Ctrl+K opens Jump over whatever page you are on: a field that finds any
song, playlist, album, artist or podcast the app already holds as you
type, with no request to Spotify, so the matches are there the moment you
stop typing. Songs come from Liked Songs and every playlist and album you
have opened; a song plays on from the playlist it was found in. The arrows
move the choice, Enter plays a song or opens anything else, Ctrl+Enter
plays a playlist, album or artist straight away, and Esc closes it. A few
commands live there too: Home, the queue, the lyrics, shuffle, repeat, the
mini player, Settings, and the shortcuts list. With nothing typed it lists
what can be opened, then the commands.
Search
Type in the field at the top and the results page opens as you type. A search is two requests at once: the catalogue (songs, artists, albums, podcasts, episodes), which a personal Spotify app answers quickly, and the playlists, which only the shared app may look for. Each half shows the moment it lands, with a spinner for the other, and typing on cancels any half still on its way instead of queueing it behind the new search.
Your Library
Pinned entries sit in a block right under Liked Songs: pin one from its context menu, drag a row into the block to pin it where you drop it, drag within the block to reorder it, and drag a pinned row below the block to unpin it.
Below the pins, the sidebar starts out sorting playlists by when you last played them. Drag one to a new place and the rest of the shelf switches to your own order instead: rows stay exactly where you drop them, and new playlists wait just under the pins until you place them. Choose Sort by recently played from any playlist’s context menu to go back; dragging a row switches to your own order again.
The Albums, Artists, and Podcasts shelves pin the same way: drag into the block, within it, or below it.
Your Library is written to disk as you use it: the playlist list, Liked Songs, and the songs of every playlist you open. The next start shows them at once, and Spotify’s answer replaces them only where something changed. A playlist’s pages are asked for several at a time and show in order, so a long playlist fills in seconds; past the first fifteen hundred songs the rest comes as you scroll, or all at once when you sort.
Use the chips to filter Your Library by Playlists, Artists, Albums, or Podcasts, or use the magnifier to search it. The control at the right of that row names the order the shelf is in, Recents or Custom order, and switches it back to recently played or between full rows, compact rows, and a grid of covers that fits as many across as the panel is wide. Liked Songs stays at the top. The current page is highlighted, and the playing playlist has a small speaker icon; hovering its cover, or the card of whatever is playing on Home, offers pause rather than a restart. Sorting a playlist by album keeps each album’s songs in disc and track order, whichever way the albums run.
Click Your Library to fold the panel down to a rail of covers; each
still opens its page, takes a dropped song, and answers a right-click, and
the library icon opens it out again. Ctrl+B hides it altogether and
brings it back.
Playlists you own are fully editable: create one with the Create
button,
add songs from any row’s menu (the list filters as you type) or by dragging
them onto a playlist in the sidebar or onto a gap in an open playlist page,
remove and reorder from the playlist page, and rename or delete from its
context menu. Reordering works by dragging a row to its new place, or from
its menu; while the table is sorted or filtered, rows keep their place.
Remove from this playlist remains available in those views, and playback
follows the visible songs in their displayed order. Clearing a destination
filter restores the Add to playlist menu’s full scrollable height.
Adding a song that is already in the playlist asks first. Dropping a song on
Liked Songs saves it. Playlists you follow can be followed and unfollowed.
When a playlist holds the same song more than once, double-clicking one copy
starts that copy, and only its row shows as playing. Editing a playlist’s
details sends only what changed; Spotify does not let apps clear a
description, so an emptied description is kept and Oxidify says so.
Click the cover at the top of a playlist, album, artist, or podcast page to
see it enlarged; click again or press Esc to close it.
Settings → Appearance chooses the accent, Oxidify’s oxide gradient (the blue to purple to orange of its logo) or a green, and can show track tables as one-line rows without covers; the library’s own view control chooses between full rows, compact rows, and the grid. Date added is relative for the first month. The date column is hidden when no real dates are available; rows with missing dates stay aligned when other rows have dates.
Search
Ctrl+F (or /) focuses search from anywhere. Results are grouped into top
result, songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes. Use the
chips to show one type. The empty search page lists recent searches; a query
typed with pauses leaves one entry. Double-click a song in the results to play
it on its own, and with Autoplay on, Spotify continues with songs like it.
With alternate playback the results play in order instead.
Clearing a previous query keeps your current page open. Typing the next query
opens Search again.
Devices and the queue
The speaker icon in the player bar lists every Spotify Connect device on your account; long lists scroll. Click one and the music moves there mid-song; the same controls keep working. “Playing on …” in the top bar reminds you when sound is coming out of something across the room. If you turned on alternate local audio, this computer is listed as a local player with that limitation, not as a Connect device, and the top bar names the match source. Playback starts as soon as the audio headers are in; some M4A files wait until download finishes. Network stalls and transient HTTP errors retry and resume. A terminal transport or decode failure stops the track instead of skipping.
The queue lives behind the list icon, as a side panel or a full page. It names the album or playlist the current song came from. Add anything to it from a row’s context menu. Right-click Home and Search cards for the same actions as elsewhere.
Receivers on the local network
A receiver running librespot or spotifyd, and some hardware speakers, appears in Spotify’s device list only after it has received an account credential. Before then, the Web API cannot see it.
Oxidify searches the local network when you open the device picker. It lists discovered receivers as on your network. Choose one to send it the stored playback credential, encrypted so that only that receiver can read it. Once connected, it appears as an ordinary Spotify Connect device and playback moves to it.
This uses the credential stored for playing on this computer, so enable playback here first (see Getting Started). Receivers that ask for a different kind of login are not connected this way yet.
Lyrics
The microphone button in the player bar (or L) opens lyrics for the playing
track beside the page. For timed lyrics, the current line is
highlighted and the panel scrolls automatically; click a line to seek to it.
Manual scrolling pauses automatic following, and Follow resumes it.
The sung line stays a fifth of the way down, so the lines still to come
fill the rest.
The expand button in the panel, F, or F11 shows the lyrics over the whole
screen; Esc, F, or F11 comes back. From 900 points wide the cover sits
large beside them, with the title and artists under it, and a song without
words shows just its cover with the reason beneath. Q adds the queue as a
column on the right; drag its left edge to resize it.
Oxidify requests lyrics from Spotify when local playback is authorized.
Otherwise, or when Spotify has no lyrics for a track, it uses
LRCLIB, an open database that needs no account. Podcasts
and tracks without a transcription show an unavailable message.
The Winamp mini player
Ctrl+M (Cmd+Shift+M on macOS), the shrink button at the right end of the player bar,
or Switch to it in Settings turns Oxidify into a small player that
wears classic Winamp skins: the .wsz files of the Winamp 2 era, of which
the Winamp Skin Museum keeps tens of thousands.
There is one window at a time; the logo in the skin’s corner, Eject, or
Ctrl+M again brings the big window back where it was.
Drop a .wsz on either window and Oxidify copies it into its skins
folder and puts it on. Settings lists every skin in that folder, with the
built-in one first, and has a button to open the folder.
The window is drawn at a whole number of screen pixels per skin pixel, so the pixels stay crisp at any size. Pick 1x to 4x from the menu behind a right-click on the title bar (or the O at the display’s edge), where always-on-top lives too; D toggles double size and A always on top, as they did. Drag the title bar to move it; it reopens where you left it, and the keyboard shortcuts work there too.
The buttons do what they say, with a few translations. Stop pauses and
rewinds, I opens the playing album in the big window, and repeat is on
or off. PL opens the playlist window under the player, in the skin’s
own frame and colours and the small unsmoothed lettering of the time: what
is playing, then the queue; double-click a
song to play from there, Ctrl-click to select several, drag the corner to
make it taller, and its X or PL again closes it. Its buttons do what
Spotify allows of what Winamp’s did: ADD finds music, SEL picks rows,
MISC opens the song’s pages, LIST OPTS plays one of your playlists or
saves the queue as a new one, and REM only explains that no app can take
from Spotify’s queue. Notices that the big window shows as toasts scroll
through the marquee here. EQ opens the equalizer between the player and the playlist: Winamp’s
ten bands and its presets, shaping the music played on this computer (a
speaker across the room plays what Spotify sends it). The preamp only
turns down, and AUTO, which loaded a preset per song, stays off. The same
equalizer is in Settings with its curve drawn from the same digital filters
used for local Spotify playback. The bands compensate for their overlap;
alternate local audio goes through this equalizer too. The X and both logos
of the main window bring back the big window; its shade button, or a
double-click on the title bar, rolls it up to a bar with the time, a small
transport, and a seek bar, as Winamp’s shade mode did. Skins that are not
rectangles keep their shape: whatever their region.txt leaves out is
see-through. Quitting is in the right-click menu and Ctrl+Q.
Click the time to count down instead of up. The balance slider moves the
sound between the speakers and the MONO and STEREO lamps are a switch,
both for music played on this computer. The playlist’s own shade button
rolls it up to a title bar and down again. The display’s left box is the
spectrum analyser, peaks and all, in the skin’s own colours; click it, or
V, for the oscilloscope, and again for nothing. It shows the sound
leaving this computer, so a device across the room leaves it flat. Modern
(Winamp 3 and 5) skins are a different format and are not supported.
The tray
Closing the window keeps the music playing: Oxidify stays in the system
tray with play, pause, skip, and quit in its menu, and clicking the icon
brings the window back. On Linux it is a standard status-notifier item, so
it works in any bar that shows tray icons, and MPRIS keeps playerctl,
media keys, and your desktop’s players widget working the whole time.
One window, one instance
Starting Oxidify while it is already running brings the existing window forward instead of opening a second instance. This avoids duplicate Spotify Connect devices and conflicting media-key handlers.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
Space |
Play or pause |
Ctrl+← / Ctrl+→ |
Previous or next |
Shift+← / Shift+→ |
Seek 10 seconds |
Ctrl+↑ / Ctrl+↓ |
Volume |
M |
Mute |
B |
Like or unlike the playing song |
S / R |
Shuffle / cycle repeat |
Q |
Queue panel |
Ctrl+Shift+Q (Cmd+U on macOS) |
Queue panel |
Ctrl+F or / |
Search |
Ctrl+K |
Jump to anything in your library |
Ctrl+B |
Show or hide Your Library |
Alt+← / Alt+→, or mouse side buttons |
Back or forward |
Ctrl+H (Cmd+Shift+H on macOS) / Ctrl+L |
Home / Liked Songs |
Ctrl+Shift+A / Ctrl+Shift+B |
Playing artist / album |
Ctrl+M (Cmd+Shift+M on macOS) |
Winamp mini player |
F or F11 |
Full-screen lyrics |
Ctrl+, |
Settings |
Ctrl+/ or ? |
All shortcuts |
Ctrl+Q |
Quit |
Otherwise, on macOS, Cmd replaces Ctrl. Text fields retain arrow-key editing and
selection; Shift shortcuts do not trigger their unshifted counterparts.
While a dialog is open, shortcuts that change the page or open another
dialog wait until it closes. The Winamp mini player answers only the
playback, volume, like, mini player and quit shortcuts.
Settings
Settings (Ctrl+,) includes the Connect device name, audio quality up to 320 kbps, volume normalisation, autoplay, gapless playback, the audio backend on Linux, the audio cache size, the equalizer, themes, album-art tinting, the mini player’s skin and size, and close-to-tray behaviour. Applying playback settings restarts the local player. A changed proxy applies the next time Oxidify starts. Other settings take effect immediately. The search field at the top keeps only the settings whose words match.