Spotify Desktop has two everyday annoyances: its volume slider is top‑heavy (the bottom half does almost nothing; 80 → 100% is a cliff), and its lyrics take over the whole window — then vanish the moment you minimize. Volumify is a tiny tray app that fixes both, without ever patching Spotify:
- 🎚️ A volume slider that's actually usable — a tunable power curve that drives Spotify's own volume, so every part of the slider counts and the level syncs everywhere (your phone, Connect speakers, the Windows mixer).
- 🎤 Lyrics that float and follow — a small synced window that stays up while you browse playlists, line‑synced and click‑to‑seek, tinted from the album art, with the exact words Spotify shows.
No client patching — it survives auto‑updates and keeps Spotify Lossless intact, and the level follows you to every device.
It overlays Spotify's own volume slider — matched to its position and width as the window resizes, and clear of the neighbouring buttons. Nudge either bar and they move together, both ways:
Window too narrow to grab the little rail? Hover it for a roomy fly‑out with a live %:
You see one slider; the app remaps it. Move it to position x (0–1) and it sets Spotify's own volume to:
gain = x ^ p
Spotify's built‑in curve is top‑heavy (≈ x⁴): park the slider at the half‑way point and you only hear about 19%. A p below 1 flattens that out — it lifts the low end so the whole slider becomes usable. At p ≈ 0.4 the half‑way point sounds like ~50%, so loudness tracks right where you put the slider; p = 1 is Spotify's raw top‑heavy default, and higher only makes it worse. Pick by feel from the tray or the panel's live curve graph:
Each preset reproduces a curve you already know — the maths is exact, not "close":
| preset | matches | feel |
|---|---|---|
| 리니어 · Linear | web YouTube — amplitude‑linear (the real "linear") | loud early; touchy near the bottom |
| 고름 · Even (recommended) | the perceptual sweet spot | perceived loudness tracks the slider evenly |
| 디스코드 · Discord | Discord / iPhone — a logarithmic dB "audio taper" | even in equal‑dB steps; fine control down low |
| 스포티파이 · Spotify | Spotify's own raw curve | top‑heavy — the problem Volumify fixes |
Starting points — tune to taste. Because the value it sets is Spotify's real volume, nothing inside Spotify is touched and the level follows you to every device.
Spotify's own lyrics take over the whole window — they hide your playlist, and they're gone the moment you minimize. Volumify floats a small synced‑lyrics window that stays put while you browse, and adds a few things Spotify's doesn't.
- Synced & click‑to‑seek — lines highlight and auto‑scroll in real time, and you can click any line to jump there, just like Spotify. The highlight is genuinely real‑time: it extrapolates the playback clock so a line lights up with the vocal, not a beat behind it.
- The exact lyrics Spotify shows — words come from Musixmatch, the catalogue Spotify itself licenses. An optional, one‑time read‑only Spotify login pins the exact version Spotify displays (matched by track); skip it and it still resolves by smart matching. For the long tail — especially Korean songs — it races Bugs, Genie, Genius and LRCLIB in parallel, so niche tracks still land.
- Album‑art tint — the window tints its backdrop from the cover, like Spotify's Now Playing view. Toggle it from the tray.
- Pin it + control playback — 📌 pin the window to keep it up when Spotify is minimized; pinned, it shows ⏮ ⏯ ⏭ so you can skip and pause without bringing Spotify back (routed through Windows' media controls, so it works while Spotify is hidden).
- Instant — it prefetches the next track's lyrics and caches them to disk, so the next song's words are up almost before it starts.
- Knows an instrumental — piano/instrumental tracks get a 🎹🐈 instead of a wrong guess.
- Your colour — Spotify green by default, a coral preset, or any custom hex / colour‑picker accent.
| where lyrics come from | role |
|---|---|
| Musixmatch | primary — Spotify's own catalogue; exact match with the optional login |
| Bugs · Genie | Korean line‑synced lyrics |
| Genius | plain‑text fallback |
| LRCLIB | community line‑synced fallback |
It reads what's playing from Windows' media controls — no patching, ever. The optional Spotify login is read‑only "currently playing" through your own free Spotify app; it never touches the client, and you can leave it off entirely.
- 🎚️ Tunable perceptual curve — presets that exactly reproduce web YouTube (Linear), the perceptual sweet spot (Even, recommended), Discord / iPhone's logarithmic dB taper, and Spotify's raw curve — with a live curve graph.
- 🎤 Floating synced lyrics — a top‑of‑everything window that stays up while you browse, with click‑to‑seek, album‑art tint, a pin + playback controls, and the exact words from Musixmatch (the catalogue Spotify licenses). More ↑
- 🔁 Two‑way sync — move Spotify's own slider (or a media key, or your phone) and Volumify follows; move Volumify and Spotify follows. Everything stays in step.
- 📱 Syncs to every device — it moves Spotify's own volume, so your phone and Connect speakers come along (no separate OS‑only gain).
- 🌐 English & 한국어 — auto‑detects your Windows language on first run; switch anytime from the tray.
- 🧲 Two ways to ride along with Spotify — use either, or both at once:
- Overlay — a slim bar right on the native rail (a green ring marks it as Volumify's, not Spotify's), with an optional hover fly‑out that appears only when the rail gets too small to drag.
- Docked panel — the curve panel snaps beside the Spotify window and follows it around.
- 💾 Remembers everything (
%APPDATA%\Volumify\settings.json) and optional run at startup. - 📦 Single self‑contained
.exe— no installer, no runtime to chase.
Volumify never patches the Spotify client — it only nudges Spotify's own volume slider from the outside, through Windows UI Automation. So Spotify is free to update itself forever and your curve just keeps working, Spotify Lossless stays intact, and there's nothing to re‑install after an update.
Just want to use it? Download the
.exe— it's self‑contained, no build required. Run it and it lives in your tray, driving Spotify's volume for you.First run: it's unsigned (open‑source, no paid certificate), so Windows SmartScreen may warn — click More info → Run anyway. With Smart App Control on (the default on some fresh Windows 11 installs) the unsigned
.exeis blocked outright — there's no "run anyway". Either turn SAC off (note: that's permanent), or build from source (below) and launch it through the Microsoft‑signed .NET host instead:dotnet windows\bin\Release\net8.0-windows10.0.19041.0\Volumify.dll.
The Windows app lives in windows/. To build from source you need the .NET 8 SDK:
cd windows
dotnet build -c Release
.\bin\Release\net8.0-windows10.0.19041.0\Volumify.exeSingle‑file, self‑contained release (.exe with no dependencies)
cd windows
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained `
-p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true `
-p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=trueThe standalone Volumify.exe lands in windows\bin\Release\net8.0-windows10.0.19041.0\win-x64\publish\.
C# / .NET 8 · WinForms (+ WPF for UI Automation) · NAudio for the Windows mixer. UI Automation drives Spotify's native volume slider (the RangeValue pattern), reads it back for two‑way sync, and locates it for the overlay — local, ~1 ms per change, and it never patches the client. Lyrics read the now‑playing track from Windows' SMTC media controls and fetch from Musixmatch (with Bugs / Genie / Genius / LRCLIB raced as fallbacks); the volume engine uses no Web API or OAuth, and the only optional sign‑in is a read‑only Spotify login (PKCE) that pins the exact lyric match. See windows/FEATURES.md for design notes, the (hard‑won) overlay‑alignment findings, and a write‑up on the performance fix — why a UI‑Automation overlay can make a Chromium app (Spotify) burn ~7% CPU, and how it was traced and fixed.
MIT — do whatever you like.