macOS Dock Party for Spotify and Apple Music

Previews

Turn your macOS Dock into a dynamic light bar that syncs with your music and brings your Dock to life in ways subtle or dramatic. Display track details and album art right beside the Dock. Control music playback with clickable controls that are always visible. Or simply give your Dock a new hue with 12 colors to choose from.

Dock Party is a lightweight Spotify and Apple Music playback controller that offers a variety of ways to display album art, song details, and track progress for the currently playing track. Dock Party runs in the background as a menu bar status item that doesn’t take up any space in the Dock. It also features a unique audio visualizer that utilizes your Mac’s built-in microphone to turn the Dock itself into a dynamic show of color and rhythm in sync with your music (or any ambient sound). There are several visualizer modes to choose from and more will be included in future, free updates.

A key advantage of Dock Party is that the controls, track details, and visualizer are always visible (as long as the Dock itself is visible). It doesn’t matter what app you’re working in; seeing what song is playing doesn’t even require a click. The visualizer never gets hidden behind other windows, unlike those OTHER guys! (Extensive testing has shown that music visualizers are less interesting when they’re not visible.)

Dock Party runs quietly and efficiently in the background with low impact on system resources. Preference options and other features can be accessed from the Menu Bar icon. Most interface elements can be turned on or off or customized.

What’s New in Version 2.2

• Detachable status bar popover window with player controls, large album art, progress bar, and track info
• Controllable track progress bar that runs along the Dock and includes its own mini controls, elapsed and total time displays, and song info
• Buttons to search song and artist info on DuckDuckGo, YouTube, Genius Lyrics, Ultimate Guitar Tabs, and BandsInTown
• More track tint color options including color cycling option
• More responsive album art resizing when there is limited space next to the Dock
• Shuffle and repeat controls
• Option to switch sides of player controls panel and track info panel
• Click on album art to bring active music player to front
• Packaged for distribution outside of the Mac App Store
• Optimized for M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips
• More preference options to adapt to a variety of screen sizes and Dock configurations

Features

• Resizes automatically along with the size and position of your Dock
• Track details and album art next to the Dock with player controls on opposite side
• Silky-smooth, controllable track progress bar along the edge of the Dock
• Amplitude, Tone, and Fourier visualizers in the Dock (requires approval of microphone access request)
• Track progress visualizer in the Dock
• Dock tint: Choose from 12 colors or cycle through colors continuously
• Runs quietly in the background as a status item in the menu bar with no icon taking up space in the Dock
• Remains visible at all times while Music or Spotify is running
• Much less irritating than the standard macOS song change notifications
• Menu bar drop-down displays song details and provides its own controls
• Dock controls appear/hide automatically when Music or Spotify is launched/closed
• Display song title, artist, and/or album name in the menu bar
• Replace the Dock Party dock icon (if enabled) with album art
• Coded in pure, modern Swift to run efficiently in the background
• Universal binary for native performance on Apple Silicon (ARM64) and Intel (x86-64) CPUs

Ratings & Reviews

I don’t have my own rating system set up yet, but click this link for a screenshot of the ratings and reviews Dock Party received on the App Store. Unfortunately, Apple’s App Review team has refused to approve further updates to the App Store version, even bug fixes, unless I remove core features that had been accepted previously — and are still present in the version they’re continuing to sell!

App Privacy

• No ads
• No in-app purchases
• Data collection limited to bare minimum necessary to support license activation

Privacy Policy

About the App Store Version

An older release of Dock Party, version 2.0.2, is still available for sale in the App Store. However, I am no longer able to update it.

Dock Party 1.0 was approved for sale in the App Store on June 14, 2018. In the 3 years that followed, I successfully submitted 11 updates, up to and including version 2.0.2.

My submission of version 2.0.3 was rejected by App Review, however, because of an App Sandbox entitlement that is suddenly no longer being granted, even though the version that remains available for purchase uses the same capability. (It just does so with more bugs and fewer features!) The entitlement in question relates to System Events, access to which is critical to Dock Party for purposes of determining and monitoring changes to the precise dimensions and location of the user’s Dock.

I spent considerable time working with App Review and code-level support to find a solution. The Apple team members I communicated with were generally responsive, but in the end they were unable to offer an alternative mechanism that would allow Dock Party to function without the newly off-limits entitlement.

So here we are.

I still think Dock Party has a lot of potential. So I have chosen to continue to develop it, with new releases being made available for purchase exclusively on my website.

This latest, non-App Store version of Dock Party has been notarized by Apple and even remains fully sandboxed.

If not for Apple’s App Store, I would never have attempted to distribute Dock Party. So I appreciate its utility. I don’t even mind the 15% Apple pockets (30% in some cases), but I do wish Apple would put more resources into screening for potentially dangerous apps during App Review instead of layering on increasingly rigid restrictions that only serve to prevent trustworthy developers from accessing the full potential of macOS.

Version History