Full screen playback info and visuals (Desktop)

[user-removed]

When you have a nice evening at home with some friends, music playing in the backgound, one question is raised every time and at least once:

- Wow, this is a great song. Who is performing this? From which album is it? Wasn't this guy playing in another band a few years ago?

Unfortunately, the desktop app is at the moment mainly focused on navigating and searching for music and not at all on the graphical / visual experience of the music being played.

On the iOS app this is far better, because you can swith to full screen mode to a static view of the front-side album art, song title and artist name. For starters, this would already be a great addition if this feature would be available for the desktop app as well.

But there are a lot more opportunities to improve the visual experience.

The best one I've experienced so far is a specific skin in XBMC/Kodi: Aeon MQ 5. It combines album art, artist art, artist biography and lyrics in one full screen view. The artist art is even dynamic and changes at a certain interval.

I added a screenshot to give you an impression.

Although there already are some ideas posted about bigger album art, I didn't see any idea's yet about the whole visual experience while listening to your music. Therefore I decided to post this idea.

Anyone else who is missing this or would like this to be developed? Or is it just me?

[Rapti]

I've been waiting for something like this all the time.

[Marco]

Marked as new idea and edited the title a bit to make it more general and easier to find via search. 😉
This idea requests a fullscreen option that also displays more info (like lyrics, album info, etc.) - you might also want to add your kudos to a similar idea about a simple fullscreen option here.

[hans-jürgen]

For those Spotify users who also scrobble to their Last.fm account, they have a fullscreen mode with album cover and clickable artist and track info called "Now playing". You can find it on your profile page in the upper navigation bar on the right, see e.g. http://www.last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen/now

You can still manage the Spotify playback with the thumbnail preview in the Windows taskbar or even enlarge it to true fullscreen mode with F11, but then the taskbar and the browser header would disappear as well.

A similar "almost fullscreen" mode seems to be already available, but is sort of a hidden feature. Since Spotify implemented zooming the view, you can press Ctrl++ up to 8x, and if you set the client to a non-maximised window, you can drag its borders until everything else disappears except the album cover and player controls. See this screenshot with the new Last.fm beta playbar on top in Firefox 39 while I was listening to my favorite Mix radio station in Last.fm:

[1222878363]

 lol might want to talk to your buddies at last fm and get these tags fixed up

[aholloway17]

It is always a topic of conversations with friends everytime we get together. Most of use are converts to spotify and that is one feature we would love to see a fullcreeen album cover of the artist currently playing. 

Allen

[hans-jürgen]

By the way, the fullscreen feature on the old Last.fm site has not been rebuilt yet on the new site, but a Reddit user recreated it lately:

https://wagnaria.xyz/now/

https://www.reddit.com/r/lastfm/comments/46ax64/i_made_a_simple_now_playing_web_app_inspired_by/

The hidden internal feature in Spotify's desktop app which I described above has been disabled in the meantime, too. The only way to enlarge the album cover for the currently playing song is to drag the sidebar border to the far right now:

[daydullcom]

I would love this. Any fullscreen simple-view option would be great (just album art, and maybe volume and pause/track controls only).

Adding lyrics and a vizualizer like winamp/Kodi have would be even better, but I'd settle just for a nice simplified "theater view" as music bee calls it. 

[Silamanagic]

The windows media center visual display is outstanding.  Album art from the albums in your collection randomly scroll as tiles in the background, while the album art for the song currently playing is large and in the front.  Lots of good ideas here in this thread.  Bottom line is, the desktop app really needs something more sexy for display.  Especially for those of us who use a home theater PC for our primary music entertainment center.

[rpjcheney]

Yes.  100% yes.

[meahtenoha]

Updated: 2016-08-05

Hey @Matysek thanks for posting your idea. We also think this is a great idea, so it's getting the 'Good Idea' status. Please continue to leave your votes and comments here and we'll update this thread if we have any news. Thanks!