macOS Dock Party for Spotify and Apple Music

10 Ratings

4.8

★★★★★

Previews

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. (If you keep your Dock hidden by default, this is not the app for you!). It doesn’t matter what app you’re working in; you can see what song is playing without a click or even a slide. 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

• 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 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 that Apple takes a 15% cut of every sale (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

v2.3.4 December 23, 2021

• Option to keep popover window open while working in other apps. (Click status bar icon to close.)
• Fixed a bug that was causing player control and track info panels to appear at first launch even when set to hidden
• General performance optimizations

v2.3.3 November 29, 2021

• Status bar popover window can be detached and dragged anywhere on screen

v2.3.2 November 27, 2021

• Fixed a bug that prevented album art from appearing in popover window in Big Sur (bug reported by Uncle Bob)

v2.3.1 November 26, 2021

• Additional button to search for song and artist on YouTube (per Cousin Miika’s feature request)

v2.3.0 November 25, 2021

• New status bar popover menu:
• Player controls
• Big ass album art
• Progress bar
• Track info
• Buttons to search song and artist info on DuckDuckGo, Genius Lyrics, Ultimate Guitar Tabs, or BandsInTown

v2.2.1 October 13, 2021

• Fixed a bug that prevented use of the new progress bar controls if user has automatic Dock hiding on in System Preferences (bug reported by Cousin Shea)

v2.2 October 11, 2021

• Packaged for distribution outside of the Mac App Store
• Universal binary for native performance on Apple Silicon (ARM64) and Intel (x86-64) CPUs
• Optimized for M-series chips
• Controllable track progress bar that runs along the Dock and includes its own mini controls, elapsed and total time displays, and song info
• More preference options to adapt to a variety of screen sizes and Dock configurations
• More responsive album art resizing when there is limited space next to the Dock
• More track tint color options including color cycling option
• Option to switch sides of player controls panel and track info panel
• Shuffle and repeat controls
• Click on album art to bring active music player to front

v2.1 June 2021

• Was supposed to be the next major update, but didn’t happen, because Apple

v2.0.3 May 29, 2021

• Minor bug fixes (Never released, because Apple)

v2.0.2 December 23, 2020

• Fixed a bug that could cause the volume control slider to stop working

v2.0.1 December 2020

• Option to replace the app icon with the album art of the currently playing track
• Bug fixes

v2.0 December 13, 2020

• macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility
• Music visualizer IN the Dock!
• Universal binary for native performance on Apple Silicon (ARM) and Intel (x86) processors
• Support for automatic Dock hiding/showing
• Option to show the app icon (support for multiple desktops)
• Dynamic layout uses precise Dock dimensions

v1.2.3 October 13, 2020

• New preference options:
  • Display album artwork only in track details area
  • Display “skip” button only in player controls area
• Fixed a bug that was causing the drop-down menu track details to display incorrectly

v1.2.2 June 14, 2020

• New preference options:
  • Display more track details in status bar
  • Hide either Dockside panel (or hide both to use status bar features only)
• Fixed a bug that could cause memory usage to increase significantly over time

v1.2.1 April 17, 2020

• Fixed a bug that prevented the menu bar track details from updating properly

v1.2 April 14, 2020

• Spotify support
• Playback controls in menu bar in addition to Dockside panels
• New preference options:
  • Show volume control slider
  • Select from 9 Dock area background colors
  • Hide Dockside panels to use menu bar features only
• Interface enhancements
• Bug fixes

v1.1.1 January 7, 2020

• Fixes a problem with the “Launch at login” preference option

v1.1 January 7, 2020

• Compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina and the new Music app

v1.0.1 June 24, 2018

• Compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra, macOS 10.12 Sierra, and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan

v1.0 June 24, 2018

• Dock Party is perfect. It has every possible feature and will never require any bug fixes.