Mac: When you’re jamming to some background music while browsing the web, getting work done, or chatting with friends, a song might pop up on one of your playlists that you absolutely love. The more this happens throughout the day, the more distracted and disjointed your work is going to feel—and you’ll never be able to focus on studying, making money, or your MMO raid if you’re constantly jumping back to iTunes or Spotify to see what’s playing.
The solution? Download the lightweight SpotMenu utility. Drop it in your Applications folder, set it to “Open at Login,” and a tiny little icon of a music note will appear on your Mac Menu Bar. Nothing will happen until you pull up a song in Spotify or iTunes. And when you do that, your menu bar will fill up with the song’s artist, name, and album.
Click on any part of gigantic stream of text and a little window will appear below you Menu Bar with the album’s artwork. Hover your cursor over it to pause the track, jump to a different section of the song, or skip backwards and forwards in your playlist.
And, yes, you can secondary click on the icon and click on Preferences to adjust exactly what you see in your Menu Bar, so listening to something from, say, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever by Explosions in the Sky doesn’t mess up the whole setup.
(If your song’s information doesn’t fit in the free space on your Menu Bar, nothing will appear—as of when we wrote this article. Perhaps the utility’s author will built in some fancy way to scroll the text or add an automatic ellipses to super-long strings of info.)