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Mute Audio Ads in Spotify

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Troubled by ads in Spotify?

Ad-supported services like Spotify are great. The audio ads are no more intrusive to what one is blasted with on the public radio, where one has very little choice over what songs you listen to. But what if you are using Spotify during a party, for example? The volume is cranked right up, everyone is dancing away, and boom… in comes an advert. Not cool.

Two solutions…

1) Either pay for Premium Spotify. Yet that may be overkill if most of the time you are fine with the ads.

2) Automatically mute the ads. Here’s how.

Smutefy to the rescue.

Download and installed Smutefy.

Smutefy

Smutefy is a small menu bar application that automatically detects and mute Spotify ads.
Start Smutefy by double clicking it in your Applications folder. Smutefy will put an icon in the right side of your menu bar. When some ad is detected by the application, the icon will change his color and will mute the system sound until the ad finishes.

Visual Ads in Spotify

If you don’t like the visual ads, you can use something like LittleSnitch or HandsOff to block Spotify access to the doubleclick.net domain. That might get rid of some of them.

Actually, I have a few lines in my hosts file that routes all requests to doubleclick.net to my local machine (along with a few thousand other ad related domain entries).

The easiest way to edit your hosts file is using Gas Mask.

127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.de
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net

Of course, Spotify needs to earn its keep one way or another. Muting audio ads doesn’t directly effect that, because they ad is still being served to your computer. You just aren’t listening to it. Of course, if every free user muted most of the audio ads, their business model would come unhitched. Blocking visual ads may have a direct effect, as the ad will not be served and thus no revenue generated.

I suggest putting up with the ads for the most part, or buying a premium account. It’s much cheaper than buying music, and beats listening to the radio.

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