MusicPop app icon

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.

◉

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.

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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.

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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.

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Keyboard the whole way

Arrow down from the search field into the results. Space plays and pauses — even from the search box, as long as you haven’t started typing.

Screenshots

MusicPop's menu bar popover showing the Songs list, with the playing song's menu open: Go to Artist, Go to Album, Favorite, Add to Playlist and more
The Albums grid in the popover, with the Up Next queue open alongside it
MusicPop as a floating window, browsing a pinned folder of music files that aren't in the Music library
MusicPop's General settings: start at login, the menu bar icon and current song, the summon shortcut, and the license
MusicPop's Sidebar settings, choosing which library sections and playlists appear and which folders are pinned

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.