This was the kind of thing we added to our desktops 20 years ago. When people posted screenshots there would always be a now playing that was probably signalling something, like "Deep Black Heart - My Emotions are Real".
Good times :D
Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#32Does OSX not have an MPRIS equivalent?
I'm not too familiar with this, but macOS does have a "Now Playing" icon in the top menu bar whenever audio is playing. It works for all audio sources (Chrome, Spotify, etc). However, to my knowledge, Apple doesn't expose this API and the tool itself is not configurable.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#33Nice! Back in around 2012 or so Spotify still didn't even do MacOS notifications so I rigged up an easy AppleScript to do it (I want to say with Growl first and a bit later with native notifications? Been a while). It's always surprising to me that Spotify/Apple Music/etc. don't seem to want to natively add functionality like this to their UX.
Yep! The current release actually still uses AppleScript. The next release will use Scripting Bridge to hook into the app's playback state change events. Much more efficient.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#34I use this: https://www.spotify-notifications.app/ Does what it says on the tin. Doesn't provide controls, but I usually have the spotify app open somewhere underneath other windows, so the play/pause/forward/back work.
Love the site design. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#35Don't remember the exact name but KDE has something like this built-in. I was actually fairly amazed how much this kind of simple UX improvement can be satisfying.
Yes! I got tired of interrupting my work "flow" to find out about a cool new song. Now I can focus just a bit more.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#36I wrote a simple tool to do just that in the taskbar on my window manager: https://fau.re/20230810_spotifyctl/ I've added key bindings to pause, or play the next/previous tracks.
Very cool. I'll take some time to check it out!
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#37It's very strange how these types of nice UX things seem to be lacking in big modern apps nowadays. I think we all know why, they aren't revenue drivers. But, surely this wouldn't be that hard for Spotify to do themselves. Shout out to this project and all the others mentioned in this thread that are adding the niceties that seem to be missing.
Thank you! :-)
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#38Nice! Back in around 2012 or so Spotify still didn't even do MacOS notifications so I rigged up an easy AppleScript to do it (I want to say with Growl first and a bit later with native notifications? Been a while). It's always surprising to me that Spotify/Apple Music/etc. don't seem to want to natively add functionality like this to their UX.
Spotify wants you to spend time in their app. Apple is just doing Apple things, I guess.
FWIW Apple always had an iTunes "now playing" thing for iChat back in the day so it's not like nobody over there thought of doing something like that.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#39It's very strange how these types of nice UX things seem to be lacking in big modern apps nowadays. I think we all know why, they aren't revenue drivers. But, surely this wouldn't be that hard for Spotify to do themselves. Shout out to this project and all the others mentioned in this thread that are adding the niceties that seem to be missing.
Modern OSes, as much as they pretend not to, are patchworks of antiquated components and designs where it's a wonder that anything integrates at all. Why is the OS not handle states and events globally? If I turn on do not disturb, it show show me as unavailable on Outlook/Teams/Google Workplace. Yet the "official" method is to go into individual apps and switch it. And god help you if you turned on DND but forgot yo…
macOS and iOS publish DND/Focus states and events; it's up to Outlook/Teams/Google Workplace to do something with them.
Re: Show HN: See your current Spotify song in the menu bar
#40Still waiting for Spotify to add this info to the Dock icon's contextual menu, like iTunes/Music has had for decades.