MusicMenu

Your Apple Music companion in the macOS menu bar.
See what's playing, control playback, and jump to songs — without ever leaving your workflow.

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✨ Features

• Now Playing at a glance — song title, artist, album, and album artwork right in your menu bar
• Playback controls — play/pause, next, previous, and a scrubbable progress bar
• Floating panel — press Ctrl+R to summon a panel at your cursor, anywhere on screen
• Jump to Apple Music — open the current artist (⌘A) or song (⌘S) directly in Music.app
• Fully configurable shortcuts — remap every hotkey from Settings (⌘,)
• Launch at login — start MusicMenu automatically when you log in
• Lightweight & native — built with SwiftUI, no Electron, no web views

📸 Screenshots

Now Playing Popover	Not Playing Popover	Settings

📥 Install

Download (recommended)

1. Grab the latest .zip from Releases
2. Unzip and move MusicMenu.app to Applications
3. First launch: right-click → Open (required for unsigned apps)
4. Grant Automation permission when macOS asks — this lets MusicMenu talk to Music.app

Note: MusicMenu is not notarized, so macOS may show a warning on first open. This is normal for open-source apps distributed outside the App Store. If the app is blocked, run:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MusicMenu.app

Build from source

# Prerequisites: macOS 14+, Xcode 16+, XcodeGen
brew install xcodegen    # if you don't have it

git clone https://github.com/niklhut/MusicMenu.git
cd MusicMenu
xcodegen generate
open MusicMenu.xcodeproj
# Press ⌘R in Xcode to build & run

⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action	Scope
Ctrl+R	Toggle floating panel at cursor	Global (configurable)
⌘,	Open Settings	Popover / Panel
⌘A	Open artist in Apple Music	Popover / Panel
⌘S	Open song in Apple Music	Popover / Panel

All shortcuts can be customized in Settings → Shortcuts.

🔒 Privacy & Permissions

MusicMenu needs one permission to work:

• Automation → Music.app — so it can read the currently playing track and control playback via ScriptingBridge

MusicMenu does not:

• Connect to the internet (except for album artwork lookups via the iTunes Search API)
• Collect or send any data
• Require an account or login

🛠 How It Works

MusicMenu uses Apple's ScriptingBridge framework to communicate directly with Music.app. It polls the current track every second, fetches album artwork (locally or via the iTunes Search API for streaming tracks), and offers playback controls — all from a native SwiftUI menu bar popover or floating panel.

Tech stack: Swift · SwiftUI · ScriptingBridge · HotKey · XcodeGen

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you run into a bug or have a feature idea, please open an issue.

When reporting bugs, include:

• Your macOS version
• Whether you're playing from a local library or streaming
• Steps to reproduce

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Built with ☕ by niklhut
_{MusicMenu is not affiliated with Apple Inc.}