Tracky

A lightweight macOS menu bar app that shows what's currently playing on your Mac, with playback controls, right from the menu bar.

• Shows the current track title, artist, and album art in the menu bar
• Works across apps that expose now-playing info to the system (Music, Spotify, Safari, etc.)
• Play/pause, next, and previous controls
• Playback progress with elapsed and total time

macOS only exposes now-playing data from the private MediaRemote framework to processes it specifically trusts. A compiled, code-signed app does not qualify, but the swift interpreter process does. To work around this, Tracky bundles a small helper script (NowPlayingHelper.txt) that it launches at startup via /usr/bin/swift. The helper queries MediaRemote directly and streams now-playing updates back to the app as JSON over stdout, while accepting playback commands over stdin.

Because of this, Tracky requires the Xcode Command Line Tools to be installed (for the swift interpreter) to function.

• macOS
• Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)

Open tracky.xcodeproj in Xcode and run the tracky target.

• tracky/trackyApp.swift - app entry point, sets up the menu bar scene
• tracky/MenuBarLabel.swift - the compact view shown in the menu bar itself
• tracky/MenuBarView.swift - the expanded popover with track info and controls
• tracky/NowPlaying/NowPlayingManager.swift - owns state and talks to the helper process
• tracky/NowPlaying/NowPlayingHelperProcess.swift - launches and communicates with the helper
• tracky/NowPlaying/NowPlayingInfo.swift - the now-playing data model
• tracky/NowPlayingHelper.txt - the script run as a child swift process to query MediaRemote

MIT, see LICENSE.