How to scale up the UI of Spotify for 4K displays

Question

The Spotify client installed from the snap store is barely usable on HiDPI displays and there seem to be no built-in options to scale the UI. Is there a workaround to scale it?

score 36 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '20 at 00:03

There is a fairly stable workaround for this. This is discussed in the Spotify forum.

To scale the UI you can set a different scale factor at the application launch. So you want to edit the .desktop file Ubuntu uses to launch spotify to adopt a custom scale factor. As you've installed it from the snap store it will likely be located at /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/spotify_spotify.desktop. If not you can use find like this: sudo find / -type f -iname spotify.desktop.

Then you just have to edit the Exec directive of this file to include the --force-device-scale-factor=X option, where X is the scale factor multiplier:

Here I use vim for editing the file but nano or gedit can be used as well.

sudo vim /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/spotify_spotify.desktop

And then you change the Exec directive to include the option:

Exec=env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/spotify_spotify.desktop /snap/bin/spotify --force-device-scale-factor=2.5 %U

You save the file, close Spotify, and open it again: it should be scaled properly now.

Gerrit Geeraerts · Answer 2 · 2022-09-06T14:09:57.633

11

In recent versions you can:

CTRL + +: increase the size
CTRL + -: decrease the size
CTRL + 0: reset the size

Warning:

Don't use SHIFT even if you need it, just press +, - or 0 without SHIFT

Don't use the numpad keys

edited Sep 06 '22 at 14:09

answered Jun 27 '22 at 08:27

Gerrit Geeraerts

426

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 22 '21 at 14:36

How to scale up the UI of Spotify for 4K displays

3 Answers3