MusicPop
Your music, without opening Music.
MusicPop is a menu‑bar player for your Apple Music library. Press a hotkey, type a few letters, hit return — the song plays and the panel is gone. Music never launches; MusicPop is its own player.
Or pick it up in a bundle with over twenty other apps.
Summon, type, play
⌘⇧M from anywhere. Four letters usually finds it. Return plays it and the panel disappears — the whole thing takes about a second. Arrow down into the results, and Space plays and pauses. To pause without opening anything, ⌥⇧⌘M plays and pauses from any app — or turn on right-click-to-play on the menu-bar icon.
Beyond your library
Switch the search to Apple Music and find any song or album, not just the ones you’ve saved. Play it straight away, or add it to your library with one click.
Music stays closed
MusicPop plays your library itself rather than driving the Music app. Nothing heavy launches, nothing appears in your Dock, nothing steals focus.
Browse and play in one place
Songs, artists, albums and your playlists in a sidebar, with the transport pinned along the bottom. Pin a folder of loose audio files and it sits in there too. Changing what’s playing never means leaving what you’re looking at.
Popover or window
Live in the menu bar, or float a resizable window and leave it open. Same view, same state — switch whenever it suits the task.
Picks up where you left off
Quit mid‑song and MusicPop remembers the track and the second you stopped at. It waits, paused, rather than startling you on login.
Screenshots
Get MusicPop
On the Mac App Store, or free to try as a direct download. Requires macOS 14 or later and an Apple Music subscription for streaming content. The store version plays your Apple Music library; the Local Files list of music the Music app keeps on your Mac is direct‑download only. Pinned folders of audio files work in both. Buying more than one app? MusicPop is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.
Support
Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.
For how-to documentation, see the MusicPop documentation.
For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.