To hear the technorati elite tell the tale, Apple’s iTunes is doomed thanks to streaming music services such as Spotify.
I’m not so sure, but I have plenty of friends and co-workers who use Spotify, even though the number of paid users is dwarfed by iTunes Music Store customers. If you like listening to music from Spotify on your Mac what you probably don’t like are all the advertisements. Here’s how to mute those ads.
Free Silence
To get a little silence where the commercials used to be on Spotify, all you need is Spotifree (clever name for an app that’s not really free; think donationware).
The way Spotifree works is ingenious (so much so that I would be surprised if Spotify’s lawyers hate the name and what it does).
It sits in the Mac’s Menubar, and like you, it listens to the music emanating from Spotify. When it detects a commercial advertisement, the sound to the Mac’s speaker is muted. When the advertisement passes, sound comes back again.
It’s a mostly free way to circumvent the most annoying part of Spotify. Ads.
Settings are simple. Setup Spotifree to run when your Mac starts up, hide the Menubar icon (not recommended), and notify you when an ad is blocked (the silence is a good tell, though a bit disconcerting).
That’s it. Spotify users can get silence instead of advertisements when listening on the Mac. Spotify does not exactly cost a lot of money to listen ad-free. Is this muting method legal? Isn’t it bad form to mute advertisements?
I can’t speak to the legalities, but people mute television commercials all the time, not to mention fast-forwarding through commercials from TV shows on a DVR. How is this any different?
