App: Dock Party
Developer: Dax Mackenzie Roggio
Genres: Music, Utilities

Turn your macOS Dock into a dynamic light bar that syncs with your music and brings your Dock to life in ways subtle or dramatic. Display track details and album cover art right beside the Dock. Control music playback with clickable controls that are always visible. Like songs. Or simply customize your Mac by giving your Dock a new tint with many colors, gradients, and animations from which to choose.

• Compatible with macOS Ventura 13 and later
• Works with Spotify desktop app or Apple Music desktop app.

Dock Party is a lightweight Spotify and Apple Music playback controller that offers a variety of ways to display album cover art, song details, and track progress for the currently playing track. Dock Party runs in the background as a menu bar status item that doesn’t take up any space in the Dock. It also features a unique audio visualizer that utilizes your Mac’s built-in microphone to turn the Dock itself into a dynamic show of color and rhythm in sync with your music (or any ambient sound). There are several visualizer modes to choose from and more will be included in future, free updates.

A key advantage of Dock Party is that the controls, track details, and visualizer are always visible as long as the Dock itself is visible. It doesn’t matter what app you’re working in; you can see what song is playing without a single click.

Dock Party runs quietly and efficiently in the background with low impact on system resources. Settings options and other features can be accessed from the Menu Bar icon. Most interface elements can be turned on or off or customized.

It is important to note that the Dock music controls and visualizer will not be visible unless the Dock itself is visible, for obvious reasons. If you always keep your Dock hidden or always run your apps in full-screen, this is probably not the app for you, although the menu bar features will still work just fine. Dock Party also works best when the Dock is positioned in its default location at the bottom of the screen, ideally with some space to spare on each side. Consider removing the icons of infrequently used apps if your Dock stretches all the way from edge to edge across the full-width of your screen. You can also opt to hide the track details completely (if they are being covered up anyway) and still see album cover artwork and visual effects. Track details can also be displayed within the Dock Party progress bar and/or in the macOS menu bar.

It is also important to note that the Dock Party music visualizers use your Mac’s built-in microphone as the audio source, which means the visualizers work sync with your music if you are listening through headphones.

Features:
• Resizes automatically along with the size and position of your Dock
• Track details and album art next to the Dock with player controls on the other side
• Silky-smooth, controllable track progress bar along the edge of the Dock
• Amplitude, Tone, and Fourier visualizers in the Dock
• Track progress visualizer in the Dock
• Dock tint: Choose from a variety of colors and gradients or cycle through colors continuously
• Runs in the background as a status item in the menu bar with no icon taking up space in the Dock
• Much less irritating than the standard macOS song change notifications
• Menu bar drop-down displays song details and provides its own controls
• Shuffle and repeat controls
• Save full-sized album cover image file to your Download directory with the Save Album Cover button
• Buttons to search song and artist info on DuckDuckGo, YouTube, Genius Lyrics, Ultimate Guitar Tabs, and BandsInTown
• Appears and hides automatically when Music or Spotify is launched or closed
• Display song title, artist, and/or album name in the menu bar
• Coded in pure, modern Swift to run efficiently
• Universal binary for native performance on Apple Silicon (ARM64) and Intel (x86-64) CPUs

Release notes:
• 2 new Dock background color animations: “Emergency” and “KITT”
• New settings option prevents degradation of audio quality when listening to music with a Bluetooth headset
• Fixed a bug that would cause a crash when clicking on album cover art or track meta data if no Spotify account was connected