When it comes to organizing your music, unique addresses supplied by Spotify can be a great help. By creating a computer shortcut — an icon on your computer that you can double-click to launch the appropriate music — you can have quick-and-easy access to albums, artists, tracks, and playlists.
You can create shortcuts and put them on your desktop (the main screen of your computer), but if you create too many, your desktop can get a little cluttered. Alternatively, you can file shortcuts in appropriate folders on your computer that reflect a structure that means something to you.
The easiest way to create a shortcut is to drag and drop the appropriate album, track, artist, or playlist to the desktop or into the folder you want.
Individual searches also have their own unique addresses, but you need to create a shortcut manually for them because they don’t support the drag-and-drop mechanism. Follow these steps to create a shortcut to a search-related address in Windows 7:
Conduct a search on Spotify.
Double-click the search text you just typed so that it becomes highlighted, and then press Ctrl+C to copy it.
You use this search query as part of your shortcut address.
Go to your desktop or browse to the folder in which you want to store the shortcut.
Right-click in the area where you want to store the shortcut, and then choose New→Shortcut from the pop-up menu that appears.
In the Create Shortcut dialog’s Type the Location of the Item text box, type spotify:search:, and then press Ctrl+V.
This step pastes into the text box the search query you copied in Step 2.
The spotify:search: bit tells your computer to launch a Spotify search that contains the content you just pasted. So, you could create a shortcut to Beyonce releases from 2009 by entering spotify:search: artist:beyonce year:2009.
Click Next to continue.
In the Type a Name for This Shortcut text box, give the shortcut a name (such as Songs I Discovered This Week), and then click Finish.
A shortcut appears — but when you manually add a shortcut this way, you don’t get the groovy Spotify icon that you get when dragging and dropping.
For Mac users, you need to follow these steps:
Conduct a search on Spotify.
Double-click the search text in the Search bar so that it becomes highlighted, and then press Command+C to copy it.
You use this search query as part of your shortcut address.
In your web browser address bar, type http://open.spotify.com/search/.
Be sure to include the forward slash at the end of the address. Don’t press Enter yet.
Press Command+V to paste the search query you copied in Step 2.
The query appears at the end of the address you entered in Step 3.
Press Enter.
A web link to the search is created.
Drag and drop the icon that appears to the left of your web browser’s address bar into your desired folder or onto the desktop.
The shortcut icon appears, ready to be clicked!
Previous versions of Spotify allowed you to simply right-click a search result, and then copy and paste the address into a browser or shortcut location bar in order to create the shortcut.
But this process doesn’t work anymore (unless Spotify reinstates it in a future version), so you need to use the workarounds. You may think the workaround is worth it if you have very complicated searches you want to save, though!