Spotify in your Mac's menu bar: the cover and the song up top, a one-click like, a player a click away, synced lyrics under the notch, and studio-style analysis of what you're hearing.
Barsong is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Spotify. There's no prebuilt download: it's built from source with one command (see Install).
Menu bar
- The album cover and "Artist – Title", with a pause badge while paused. The text can be reordered, shortened or hidden, and sits on an optional pill.
- One click on + adds the song to Liked Songs; the check mark removes it. It appears once a Spotify account is connected (see Connect your Spotify account).
- A lyrics button turns the floating lyrics on.
Player
- Play/pause, previous, next, shuffle, repeat, a scrubber, and Spotify's own volume.
- Click the title or cover to open the song in Spotify, the artist or album to open those, or the copy button for its link.
- Full and compact layouts, a pin to keep the player open, and your choice of accent colour.
Lyrics
- Synced lyrics in a floating pill below the menu bar, draggable anywhere, in four styles.
- Click a line to jump to it, or expand to a full-height view of the whole song.
- From LRCLIB, with NetEase as a fallback. The timing can be nudged if it drifts.
Visualizer
- Nine studio-style views of Spotify's audio beside the player: spectrum, spectrogram, scopes, level and loudness meters, and key. See Visualizer below.
General
- Open at login.
The visualizer column sits to the right of the full player. Click a visual, or use the ‹ › arrows above it, to switch.
- Full screen: the expand button in a visual's corner opens a full-screen view, with the player on the left and every visual at once.
- Pausing: freezes the picture exactly as it was, so you can study it, and listening stops until you press play.
- What a tap is: a Core Audio process tap on Spotify's own processes. The system hands Barsong a copy of the audio those processes send to your output device: nothing is heard through a microphone, no other app's sound is in the stream, and Spotify plays on untouched.
- When it listens: only while a visual is on screen and the music plays. Pausing removes the tap, and a new track restarts the loudness, key and tempo measurements, which take a few seconds to settle.
- What is done with it: every visual is drawn from one analysis pass over that audio — the levels and the loudness meter from each chunk as it arrives, the spectrum, waveform, spectrogram, notes, key and tempo from short windows of it, up to sixty times a second.
- What gets measured is Spotify's output, after its volume and Normalize volume settings — which is why the loudness meter asks for 100%.
- macOS 13 or later. The visualizer needs macOS 14.2 or later and the System Audio Recording permission.
- The Spotify desktop app.
- For Liked Songs and the artist and album links: a Spotify account that can create a developer app. Spotify currently requires Premium for that.
Clone it and run the installer:
git clone https://github.com/asger3p/barsong.git
cd barsong
./install.shThat's all of it. install.sh checks that you're on a new enough macOS and that the Xcode command line tools are there — starting Apple's installer for you if they aren't — then builds the app, installs it to ~/Applications/Barsong.app and opens it. Run it again to update.
If you'd rather skip the checks, ./build.sh does the build and install on its own.
macOS asks for two permissions:
- "Barsong wants to control Spotify": needed to read the current song and cover, and to play, pause, skip, seek and change the volume. Barsong doesn't start Spotify on its own: it only launches it if you click the cover or title while nothing is playing.
- System Audio Recording: only asked when the visualizer first opens. It lets Barsong tap Spotify's own processes (see How the data is collected); Spotify keeps playing normally and no other app's audio is included.
Both can be changed later in macOS System Settings → Privacy & Security.
Liked Songs and the artist and album links use the Spotify Web API. Each user signs in through a small Spotify app of their own, so there's no shared key and no user limit. Barsong walks you through it under Settings (gear icon) → Spotify Account:
- Create a Spotify app. "Open Spotify dashboard" takes you to the form. Copy in the app name and the redirect URI (
http://127.0.0.1:43117/callback) with the copy buttons, tick Web API and save. - Paste its Client ID, found under the app's Settings. Barsong connects as soon as a complete Client ID is pasted.
- Approve in the browser. This starts by itself once the Client ID is in; the Connect button starts it again if it doesn't. After that, Barsong keeps you signed in.
Barsong talks to five places, and only these:
- LRCLIB (lyrics): the artist, title, album and length of the current song. If that finds no synced lyrics, a second request sends just the artist and title to its search endpoint. These requests identify themselves as
Barsong/1.0. - NetEase (fallback lyrics, only when LRCLIB has none): the artist and title as one search string, then the id of the matching song — no album, no length. These requests identify themselves as
Barsong/1.0too. - Spotify's accounts service (signing in): the one-time code from the browser and your refresh token, exchanged there for the access tokens the Web API needs.
- Spotify's Web API (Liked Songs, artist and album links): track, artist and album ids, with the token from your own developer app.
- Spotify's image servers: the cover, from whatever URL Spotify reports for the current track.
Everything else stays on your Mac:
- Settings and your Client ID are kept in the app's preferences, which are not encrypted.
- The Spotify refresh token is kept in your Keychain. Access tokens are held in memory only.
- Audio is analysed live in memory and never stored or sent anywhere.
- No cover, or the buttons do nothing: allow Barsong under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation → Spotify.
- The visualizer says "No sound coming through": allow Barsong under System Settings → Privacy & Security → System Audio Recording, then reopen the player.
- Connecting fails with "Couldn't listen on port 43117": another program is using that port. Quit it and try again.
- "Spotify API error 403": check that Web API is ticked for your developer app.
- No lyrics for a song: neither LRCLIB nor NetEase has synced lyrics for it. The lyrics button shows a crossed-out mic when that's the case.
Turn off Open Barsong at login first (or remove Barsong later under System Settings → General → Login Items), then:
rm -rf ~/Applications/Barsong.app
defaults delete dev.asger.Barsong
security delete-generic-password -s dev.asger.Barsong- LRCLIB for synced lyrics.
- NetEase Cloud Music as a fallback lyrics source, an idea borrowed from LyricFever.
MIT. See LICENSE.