I listen to a lot of music while working and love to quickly check what’s currently playing, which is why I checked out MediaMate. It’s an indie app for Mac that costs €7 (roughly $7.50) that shows the current track, either as an extension to the MacBook “notch” or as a semi-transparent pop-up. It can show up every time the track changes, every time you adjust the volume, or when you hover your mouse over the notch.
This is nice for quickly checking what’s playing but also for figuring out which media application currently “owns” the media control keys. For example: sometimes I click play on a video online while I’m also listening to music. I’ll hit “pause” with the intention of pausing the music only for the video to pause. This is annoying because I don’t really understand what’s going on, but with MediaMate I can at least see in real time which application I’m pausing and playing.
Credit: Justin Pot
MediaMate also replaces the bulky volume and brightness popups with slimmer ones. Granted, this is a minor cosmetic change, but it’s one I appreciate. You can even combine this with the now-playing section in the notch, as seen at the top of this article. Another choice is to have a thin volume display at the bottom of the screen.
Credit: Justin Pot
All of this can be customized a create deal in the settings—you can choose between four different styles for the volume and brightness overlays and configure quite a bit about how they all work. If you’re the kind of person who loves tweaking things and isn’t quite happy with how macOS handles the volume and brightness overlays, it’s worth a download.
