From Wired How-To Wiki

Spotify has finally made it to the US! But signing up for the wildly popular music-streaming service is only half the battle. Here's how to spruce up Spotify’s generic desktop player with third party plugins.

Sign Up

Every journey starts somewhere, and this one starts with having Spotify. If you don't already have the desktop streaming client, you can find it here. Getting started is relatively painless, easy, and requires little more than an email address.

If this is your first foray into the service, you'll probably want to spend some time familiarizing yourself before venturing ahead. Feel free to get a feel for how to build/share playlists. Or better yet, check out Wired's Spotify hands-on.

Bring The Beat to the Browser

The Spotify player doesn’t have to be a landlocked desktop app. Integrating Spotify’s search and playback controls into your browser has never been easier.

Our advice? Stick to basic plugins like FoxyTunes, MadPixel’s Spotify Chrome Extension, or Johan Brook’s Safari Spotify Extension. Though the feature sets vary from plugin to plugin, it’s best to choose a lightweight option that makes Spotify search and playback easy without sacrificing your websurfing experience.

Change Your Pitch Up

Spotify is great for finding music, but it's not always so great at playback. One of the easiest ways to add oomph to your music is by adding an EQ plugin. These snippets of software integrate themselves into the Spotify player and basically let you tweak the bass, treble and mid levels of your music during playback.

Plugins like Equalify are a great starting point for the Windows set, but EQ options are currently a little dicey for Mac users. Spotify recently released its API to iOS developers, so this is likely to change in the coming months.

Don't Forget The Words

Want to sing along with that rare Sigur Ros B-side you discovered? A good lyric finder should do the trick. These plugins scour the web to provide lyrics for songs in your collection.

Regardless of whether you’re wanting to belt out some Celine Dione karaoke-style, or finally learn the words to Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter,” plugins like Lyrify and Listdj should have your back.

'Pro tip: Keep in mind that mileage my vary. Though lyric plugins tend to have access to fairly extensive song banks, it's still possible to occasionally stump them. Misspellings and the occasional weird line break aren’t uncommon either--but that’s the cost of free.

Control Remotely

Sure, you can sit perched over the computer switching tracks. But why not use your smartphone to play DJ instead?

Remote plugins provide this convenience (and freedom of movement) to the savvy Spotify user. Even better, there are plenty of options for both the iOS and Android camps. Remoteless (iOS/Windows) and ReSpot (Android) are two of the most popular add-ons, but there’s no shortage of options.

Pro tip: Almost all smartphone-minded remote apps require a WiFi connection to the computer running Spotify. Keep in mind that you might be in for firewall wrangling before you get things running smoothly.

Original article by Terrence Russell, Wired.com.