Keyboard shortcuts offer you an alternative means of moving around Spotify. It’s perfectly fine to navigate your way around the Spotify window by using a mouse; selecting menus to achieve tasks, and clicking or double-clicking here and there. It’s an extremely intuitive way to go.
But at times, you might want to use keyboard shortcuts to achieve certain tasks quickly — for example, just pressing Ctrl+F on a PC brings up a Search text box that you can use to filter a bunch of search results.
Here are Spotify’s official keyboard shortcuts. You can also find this list online as well.
| Task | Shortcut (PC) | Shortcut (Mac) |
|---|---|---|
| Create new playlist | Ctrl+N | Command+N |
| Copy | Ctrl+C | Command+C |
| Cut | Ctrl+X | Command+X |
| Paste | Ctrl+V | Command+V |
| Delete | Del | Backspace |
| Select All | Ctrl+A | Command+A |
| Deselect items | Ctrl+Shift+A | Command+Shift+A |
| Play/pause | Space | Space |
| Next track | Ctrl+Right arrow | Command+Right arrow |
| Previous track | Ctrl+Left arrow | Command+Left arrow |
| Volume up | Ctrl+Up arrow | Command+Up arrow |
| Volume down | Ctrl+Down arrow | Command+Down arrow |
| Mute | Ctrl+Shift+Down arrow | Command+Shift+Down arrow |
| Help | F1 | Command+Shift+/ |
| Go to the Search text box | Ctrl+L | Command+L |
| Browse back (to the previous screen) | Alt+Left arrow | Command+[ (left bracket) |
| Browse forward | Alt+Right arrow | Command+] (right bracket) |
| Play the highlighted (selected) row | Enter | Enter |
| Preferences | Ctrl+P | Command+, (comma) |
| Log out active user | Ctrl+Shift+W | Command+W |
| Quit (close) Spotify | Alt+F4 | Command+Q |
| Hide/close the Spotify window | - (dash) | Command+H |
| Restore the hidden Spotify window | - (dash) | Command+Alt+1 |
| View album artwork in track listings | Ctrl+G | Command+G |
Don’t forget, too, that if you have a keyboard that includes media keys on it, Spotify’s been designed to work with those keys.
When quitting Spotify in Windows, you can’t just click the X at the top-right of the window like you usually do when quitting many other programs. This action only minimizes the Spotify window; it doesn’t shut down Spotify itself, which continues to show up in the taskbar in the background.
To properly quit Spotify, you have to either use the Ctrl+Q shortcut or choose File→Exit in the Spotify window. (This action will sound familiar to Mac users who are used to quitting programs in this way!)