MusicPop documentation
A menu-bar player for your Apple Music library. Press the hotkey, type a few letters, hit return — the song plays and the panel disappears. This page walks through everything in roughly the order you’d meet it.
The thing worth knowing up front: MusicPop is a player, not a remote control. It doesn’t drive the Music app; it plays your library itself. Music never launches, never appears in your Dock, and never takes focus.
Installation
MusicPop is a standard .dmg — open it and drag MusicPop.app to your Applications folder. It requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.
MusicPop lives in the menu bar and has no Dock icon. After launching it the first time, look for the ♪ in your menu bar.
Playing Apple Music content requires an active Apple Music subscription. Music files stored on your Mac play without one.
Granting access
The first time MusicPop runs it asks for access to Media & Apple Music. That permission is what lets it read your library and play it; without it MusicPop has nothing to show you.
If you dismissed the prompt or changed your mind, grant it in System Settings ’ Privacy & Security ’ Media & Apple Music, then quit and reopen MusicPop. You can check what MusicPop can currently see in Settings ’ Library.
Quick start
- Press ⌘⇧M anywhere on your Mac. MusicPop appears under its menu bar icon with the search field already focused.
- Type a few letters of a song, artist or album.
- Press Return. The top result starts playing and the panel closes.
That’s the whole loop. Everything below is what’s there when you want more than that.
Search
The search field is focused the moment MusicPop opens, so you can start typing immediately. It searches your library — both Apple Music content and any files on this Mac — by song title, artist and album.
Return plays the highlighted result, or the first one if you haven’t moved off the field. Press ↓ or Tab to move into the results and arrow through them; Return plays whatever is selected.
Playing from a search queues the whole result list, so Next carries on through what you searched for rather than stopping after one song.
⌘F returns focus to the search field from anywhere in the browser.
The sidebar
Four sections cover your library — Songs, Artists, Albums and your Playlists, each playlist listed individually. Click one to browse it. Two more sections appear when there’s something to put in them: Folders for anything you’ve pinned, and On This Mac for local files.
Large libraries load as you scroll rather than all at once, so the first rows appear immediately. Sections you’ve already visited come back instantly when you return to them.
Untitled albums and artists are hidden. Apple Music creates these when loose tracks have no album of their own, and a list of blank rows is noise rather than something you can navigate.
Artists and albums
Double-click an artist to see their albums, and an album to see its tracks. The back and forward arrows at the top left retrace your steps, as do ⌘[ and ⌘].
Album and playlist tracks stay in their proper order rather than being alphabetised — the running order of a record is part of the record.
Grid view
Artists and albums can be shown as a grid of artwork instead of a list. Toggle it with the control at the top right of the browser, or in Settings ’ Appearance.
Songs, playlist contents and search results always use the list. A grid of songs is all text and no artwork, which is worse than the list at the job.
Local files
If you have music files stored on this Mac — ripped CDs, imported MP3s, anything the Music app knows about that isn’t streamed — an On This Mac section appears in the sidebar with those tracks. They play without a subscription and without a network connection.
If your library is entirely Apple Music, that section doesn’t appear at all, because there’s nothing to put in it.
The Mac App Store version has no On This Mac section either way: the API that enumerates the Music app’s local tracks doesn’t work inside the store’s sandbox. If you want that list, use the direct download.
MusicPop reads that list once at launch. If you add music to the Music app while MusicPop is running, use Reload Local Library in Settings ’ Library or the menu bar icon’s right-click menu.
Pinned folders
Audio that was never added to the Music app at all — a folder of samples, your downloads, an album someone sent you — can be pinned to the sidebar instead. Open Settings ’ Sidebar, click Add Folder… and choose it. A Folders section appears in the sidebar with a row for each folder you’ve pinned, and it browses and plays like any other row.
Folders are read right through their subfolders, since a music folder is usually a set of album directories and a flat look at the top level would often show nothing playable. Anything macOS recognizes as audio comes along, rather than a fixed list of file extensions. One folder is capped at 2,000 files — a pinned folder is meant to be a working set, not a second library. A file carrying no metadata is listed under its filename.
These are only files, so they play without a subscription and without a network connection — and they work in both versions of MusicPop, the Mac App Store one included.
A pin is stored as a bookmark rather than a path, so renaming or moving the folder doesn’t break it. A folder on a volume that isn’t mounted loses its sidebar row until the volume is back, and stays pinned in the meantime. To unpin one, use the minus button beside it in Settings ’ Sidebar.
Starting playback
Press Return on a selected row, double-click a row, or hover a song and click the play button on its artwork. Any of the three starts it and queues everything else currently listed behind it.
The player bar
The transport sits along the bottom of the browser and stays put while you look around — changing what’s playing never means leaving what you’re browsing.
It carries previous, play/pause and next, the artwork, the title and artist, the elapsed and total time, and a scrubber you can drag to move within the track.
A volume slider appears for music playing from files on your Mac. Apple Music playback goes through the system volume, which macOS controls rather than MusicPop, so there’s no separate slider for it.
Shuffle and repeat
Two controls at the right of the player bar. Shuffle reorders the current queue, keeping whatever is playing where it is so toggling it mid-song doesn’t jump. Repeat cycles through off, all, and one — hover it to see which it’s on.
Up Next
Right-click a song and choose Play Next to slot it in after the current track, or Add to Queue to put it at the end. The list button at the right of the player bar, or ⌥⌘U, opens the Up Next pane, where you can drag songs into a different order, right-click one to play or remove it, or clear the lot.
Picking up where you left off
Quit mid-song and MusicPop remembers the track, its queue, and the second you stopped at. Next time you open it, that track is sitting in the player bar at the same position.
It waits, paused, rather than starting on its own. An app that begins playing music the moment you log in is not a welcome one.
Popover or window
MusicPop can hang from the menu bar as a popover, or float as a resizable window you leave open. The button in the top right switches between them, as does Settings ’ Appearance. Both show the same thing and share the same state, so switching never loses your place.
The window remembers where you put it and how big it was, between launches as well as between visits.
The popover closes when you click away. If you’d rather it stayed put, turn off Close on click outside in Settings ’ Appearance.
The menu bar icon
To keep the menu bar clear, turn off Show icon in the menu bar in Settings ’ General. The popover hangs from that icon, so MusicPop switches to window mode while it’s hidden. Reach it with the keyboard shortcut, or by opening MusicPop again from the Finder or Spotlight. Choosing popover mode again brings the icon back.
In the same place, Show the current song puts the playing track’s title next to the icon. It’s off by default, and long titles are shortened.
Interface size
Settings ’ Appearance ’ Interface Size makes MusicPop’s own text and controls larger without changing your display’s resolution. Choose Default or Large; the sidebar, Up Next and the player bar grow to fit. Artwork in the list stays the same size, and the Settings window isn’t affected.
Settings
Open Settings with ⌘,, from the … menu, or by right-clicking the menu bar icon. Four tabs:
- General — start at login, the menu bar icon and the current song beside it, the global keyboard shortcut, and your license once you’ve activated one.
- Appearance — Interface Size, popover or window, whether the popover closes on an outside click, and whether to show the sidebar and use a grid for artists and albums.
- Sidebar — which library rows and playlists appear in the sidebar, and the folders you’ve pinned to it: add one, see where it points, or unpin it.
- Library — what MusicPop can currently see: whether it has access, whether your subscription can play catalog content, whether your cloud library is on, how many local files and playlists it found, and buttons to reload or re-check. This is the place to look if something isn’t appearing.
Keyboard shortcuts
| ⌘⇧M | Show or hide MusicPop (configurable) |
| ⌘F | Focus the search field |
| ↓ / Tab | Move from search into the results |
| Return | Play the selected row, or open an artist or album |
| Space | Play or pause — including from the search field, as long as you haven’t started typing |
| ← / → | Previous or next track — same rule in the search field |
| ⌘[ / ⌘] | Back and forward |
| ⌥⌘U | Show or hide Up Next |
| ⌘, | Settings |
| Esc | Close the popover |
Space types a space once there’s text in the search field, so two-word searches still work. It only acts as play/pause when the field is empty, and the arrow keys follow the same rule — once you’re typing they move the insertion point. In the grid, ← and → move between tiles instead; the transport keeps Space there.
Accessibility
MusicPop works with VoiceOver. Every button in the player and toolbar has a name, and each song reads as one sentence: its title, artist, whether it’s playing, and its length. Play Next, Add to Queue and Favorite are available as VoiceOver actions on a song, and songs in Up Next offer Move Up and Move Down, so you can reorder the queue without dragging.
Voice Control can reach every control by name, the sidebar included. MusicPop also follows your accessibility settings in System Settings:
- Differentiate Without Color — Shuffle, Repeat and Up Next mark themselves with a shape when they’re on, not only with a color.
- Increase Contrast — the faintest controls are drawn darker.
- Reduce Motion — the sidebar and Up Next appear and disappear without sliding.
Updates
MusicPop checks for updates on its own and will offer them when they appear. You can also check any time from Check for Updates… in the … menu.
License
MusicPop is free to try. After a while it will occasionally remind you that a license is available; a license removes the reminder and supports the work.
Enter a key with Enter License… from the … menu or the menu bar icon’s right-click menu. Once activated, those entries disappear and your license details move to Settings ’ General.
MusicPop is also included in my bundles alongside over twenty other apps.