How to mute Spotify adverts Part 4: Final roundup
I love Spotify. Great music and amazing social connectivity via the new Facebook gateway. In less than a year it has replaced my default music players on my mac as well as my iPhone.
Many people have installed my Spotify mute scripts for mac, and most of them battled defiantly against all odds to get it running. It’s not the most elegant solution out there, but it does the job.
But now, at long last someone has bundled up my solution into a single zipfile along with a one-click Applescript executable and an icon to boot! Many thanks to Jose A. Lopez, wherever you are. More on this below, but now, a brief roundup of how we got to here.
It all started in January last year when Spotify finally turned on the advert system and listening to “Hi, I’m Roberta from Spotify” threatened my sanity one too many times.
My first post explained the original (now broken) method of muting adverts. It relied on simply muting the system sound system which is no good because clever Spotify now detects that and pauses the ad:
The second post had a workaound for this by using Soundflower to switch the output audio to an “unconnected” virtual output device.
The third post explains how to get this all working nicely with Growl – it does involve running my hacked version of Growl but don’t be scared, it doesn’t contain anything evil. Muhahaha!
Without further ado, here are the mirrors for Jose’s fabulous one-click Spotify ad killer for OSX:
[Edit on 29 Aug 2010]
Windows users, listen up! Tristan Bemert emailed me a note about Blockify – a Spotify muter for Windows. Tristan writes:
My software is easy to use, with no setup or installation, it is a tiny executable, with minimal memory usage. The only thing the user must do is press a hotkey to add the advert to a list, please note that it is not specific to the individual advert, but rather to the company. For example you add Sony to the list, and all Sony adverts will be blocked from that point on. It was written in AutoIt, and I would be more than happy to share the source code with other developers.
Enjoy!
Lastly (here comes the obligatory disclaimer) if you really like the music you listen to then you should pay for it. Yes, I know this offends your hacker sensibilities, and it mildly offends mine too. But ultimately the capitalist in me triumphs and I believe that the people who create the content should be paid. So support platforms like Spotify and buy a premium subscription – it really is worth it.
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karel 08:29 on 15 June 2010
a simpler solution can be found here: http://smutefy.inacho.es/
But yours can be easily edited for use with other audio-ports like soundfly, airfoil and usb-audiointerfaces.
Works pretty good, just not cutting off the first sec of the ads.
Thanks a lot! -
Peter MacRobert 23:39 on 15 June 2010
Hi Karel
Thanks for pointing that out to me – it looks like a very elegant solution indeed!
Though, without sounding my own trumpet too much, and not having spoken to the developer behind it, I’d hazard a guess that their code is inspired by my solution (if not entirely based on mine). They use growl events and soundflower in order to achieve the solution – both of which appeared in my original solution back in January 2009.
Cheers,
Pete