MacPod

A tiny iPod Nano (technically Nano 1) on your Mac that controls whatever's playing.

It looks like a first-gen iPod Nano and behaves like one. The clickwheel does what you'd expect — play, pause, skip. It shows the track, artist, album, artwork, and a proper blue-striped progress bar. It works with Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, browsers, podcast apps — basically anything the Mac's system "Now Playing" knows about.

• Floating or Window mode — keep it hovering always-on-top, or place it as a regular window.
• Light or dark shell — it can show either a white or a black iPod, following your system dark mode.
• Menu bar icon — click it for show/hide, transport, settings, quit.
• Battery indicator — the little icon in the screen header reflects your actual Mac battery.

1. Download the latest MacPod.app.zip from the releases page.

2. Unzip it and drag MacPod.app into your Applications folder.

3. The first time you launch it, macOS will refuse — the app isn't signed by a paid Apple Developer account. To get past Gatekeeper:

   Option A — right-click open (simplest):

   • In Finder, right-click MacPod.app and choose Open.
   • Click Open in the warning dialog.
   • You only need to do this once.

   Option B — remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MacPod.app

   Then double-click to launch normally.

MacPod lives in your menu bar (the little play/pause icon). Click it for the menu.

• macOS 13 or later (tested up to macOS 26 / Tahoe).

If you'd rather build it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/ymolodtsov/macpod.git
cd macpod
./Scripts/build-app.sh
open build/MacPod.app

Requires Xcode command-line tools. The bundled media-remote adapter is pre-built; to rebuild it from its upstream source, run ./Scripts/rebuild-adapter.sh (needs cmake and ninja).

Uses the excellent mediaremote-adapter to talk to macOS's private MediaRemote framework in a way that still works on modern macOS.

MIT.