Warble shows what's playing in the notch at the top of your Mac's screen. Hover over the notch to see the song, and click it to open the app playing it, then play, pause, skip or switch speakers. When nothing is playing, it stays out of sight, and pointing at the notch brings back the last song so you can play it again.
Warble is in beta: it works, and it's still being built.
Install
brew install lorcanchinnock/tap/warble
Or download the latest release and drag Warble into Applications. It needs macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. Warble isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS blocks it the first time you open it: the install steps show how to open it anyway. The user guide covers the rest. Warble follows your Mac's language: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese or Simplified Chinese.
Features
- What's playing, in the notch. The album art sits on one side, and on the other a few bars move while it plays. Open it to see the song on a soft glow in the album art's colours. The title and bars take a touch of the album's colour too, and Settings has a choice of typeface for the title.
- Controls. Play, pause, skip, move through the song, and turn shuffle and repeat on or off when the app has them. Drag the volume bar, or scroll over the notch with two fingers: up and down changes the volume, sliding sideways moves through the song and a quick sideways flick skips.
- Switch speakers. Move your Mac's sound to its own speakers, headphones or AirPods from the notch.
- Any player. Apple Music, Spotify, podcast apps and video in your browser.
- Calm by default. A paused song stays until something else plays, or for 10 seconds or a minute if you choose that in Settings. When nothing is playing, it hides behind the notch and uses no CPU, and pointing at the notch opens a small card with the last song and a play button, kept in memory only.
- Every Mac. A main display without a notch, on a Mac without one or an external display, gets a notch Warble draws at the top.
- For everyone. Works with VoiceOver, and follows Increase Contrast and Reduce Motion.
- Little to set up. Open at login, and a switch for the title in a virtual notch, which is on at first. Right-click the notch, or use the menu bar icon, for Settings, updates and Quit.
Privacy
Warble collects nothing. It has no account, no cloud and no analytics, and it goes online only to check for updates, after you agree, and to find the album cover for a song playing in your browser, which sends just its title and artist to Apple's iTunes Search. When you click the artist, it asks Spotify or YouTube for the artist's page.
Contributing
Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to build Warble from source, run the tests and send a change. To report a security problem, see SECURITY.md.
Warble shares its repository layout, tooling and release pipeline with Shot, a screenshot app by the same author.
Support
Warble is free, with no ads. Sponsoring keeps it that way and helps pay to notarize it.
License
Warble is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
Acknowledgements
Warble updates itself with Sparkle, under the MIT license, and reads what's playing with MediaRemote Adapter, under the BSD 3-Clause license. See Acknowledgements.
