Spotify finally works properly on Google’s Chromebook Pixel
If you’re a Spotify fan who also happens to own Google’s Chromebook Pixel, you’ve probably been disappointed for a very long time. That’s because the web player for one of the most popular streaming music services was simply broken – more specifically, it seemed as if there was a compatibility issue between the Pixel’s touchscreen and Spotify’s web software. The most popular theory was that Spotify recognized the Pixel as a touchscreen device, and thus assumed that the computer does not have a mouse. However, when attempting to select individual tracks – using either the touchscreen or the trackpad – they didn’t play.
Luckily, it appears that this issue has been resolved, at least for now. I recently navigated over to Spotify’s web player and was able to go through all my old playlists, just like I was able to do on my old Samsung ARM Chromebook. I’m not quite sure how long this has been fixed, since I’ve been living in Google Play Music All Access for the past month, but I’m glad to see that Pixel owners have not been left out to dry.
However, since I’m currently running the beta channel of Chrome OS, I’m unsure if this fix is available to everyone or not. In case it isn’t, or in case the problem returns, I discovered another way to play Spotify, although it will disable your touchscreen in the process:
- Navigate to chrome://flags
- Find Enable touch events and select Disabled.
- Click the restart button that appears at the bottom of your screen.
I found that disabling the touchscreen also caused Spotify to work properly, even before it was fixed like it apparently is now. And since Chrome OS reboots so quickly, this wasn’t really too much of a hassle at all.
Hopefully you won’t have to resort to this, but as the Pixel receives regular updates, or as new touch-enabled Chrome OS devices are released into the wild, it’s always possible that the Spotify problem could return. Luckily, the fix is very easy.
