NowPlayingReporter

NowPlayingReporter is a simple CLI tool for macOS 12.0+ that emits information about the currently-playing audio track in easy-to-parse JSON format. When the user hits play/pause or changes to a different track, that information is reported on a new line:

$ ./NowPlayingReporter
{"artist":"Dua Lipa","name":"Dance The Night","playing":true}
{"artist":"Dua Lipa","name":"Dance The Night","playing":false}
{"artist":"Screen Junkies","name":"Honest Trailers | Barbie","playing":true}

This tool uses the MediaRemote framework, which provides the same information displayed in the Now Playing widget in Control Center.

Important note for developers: MediaRemote is a private framework. Backward compatibility in future macOS versions is not guaranteed, and applications that use the framework in any way cannot be distributed through the Mac App Store.

Building

First, install Swift. Then:

swift build --configuration=release --arch arm64 --arch x86_64

This will emit a unified binary to .build/apple/Products/Release/NowPlayingReporter.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to John Coates for Aerial, which the MediaRemote code in this project is adapted from.