I recently became a fan and satisfied subscriber of Spotify, a music streaming & playlist sharing app. Apart from wishing for some more features, there’s been just one big thing hampering my switch from iTunes as my primary music listening app. Mouse gestures. I absolutely love them as they make a lot of my interaction with the computer so much faster and enjoyable. Click and hold right mouse button & drag right to close a window, up and down to play/pause music, right and down for next song…

I have been using xGestures to enable system-wide mouse gestures for ages and I couldn’t live without it. Ok, ok, I could live without it technically, but what kind of life would that be?! :) If you’re on a Mac, go get it immediately.

Which brings me to my point, xGestures has built in iTunes commands for play/pause next song, etc., but no such thing exists for Spotify. Because it’s customizable you can set it to perform keystrokes in Spotify, but that way it would only work when the Spotify was already active. The need to click and activate the app is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

So I wrote a few short and extremely simple scripts in AppleScript that make Spotify the active app and tell it to switch to next song, previous song or play/pause. Then I set xGestures to execute the script based on the gesture I make. It works, sometimes with a bit of a lag, but good enough.

If you want to control Spotify with xGestures as well, here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Spotify xGestures scripts.

2. In System Preferences, go to the xGestures panel and create a global gesture. I like to use right and down for next song for example, but you can use whatever you like.

3. For Gesture Action, choose Run AppleScript from the dropdown menu. Click Choose file and point to the script you downloaded. Do so for all three gestures.

4. Enjoy listening to music without the chore of having to actually click in Spotify. :)

Hope you find it useful. If you’re looking for some new music in Spotify, you can also check out my New Times playlist and hear if there’s something that suits your ears.