Apple Music Support

[dobermai]

Apple Music Support would be Sweet

[joshmedeski]

I spent some time exploring what Apple Music support would actually look like. I have a working proof-of-concept on a branch, but there are some real tradeoffs worth discussing before this goes further.

How it works:
Since Apple Music doesn't expose a public API for playback data, the approach is an "observer mode" (--observer applemusic) where cliamp acts as a passive Now Playing display + remote control. Apple Music owns the audio pipeline entirely — cliamp polls its state via AppleScript (~500ms interval) and forwards play/pause/next/prev/seek commands back to it.

For visualizations, ScreenCaptureKit (macOS 13+) can tap Apple Music's audio output and feed it into cliamp's existing spectrum/waveform visualizers. This requires a one-time macOS audio recording permission prompt.

What works:

• Track info (title, artist, album, duration, position)
• Playback controls forwarded to Apple Music
• Real visualizations via ScreenCaptureKit audio capture
• Graceful handling when Music.app isn't running

The compromises:

• Fundamentally different mode — this isn't a provider like Spotify/Navidrome. cliamp doesn't play audio at all. It required a whole new ObserverEngine that implements player.Engine with most methods as no-ops. It's a second operating mode bolted onto the existing architecture.
• EQ, speed, mono are non-functional — since audio doesn't flow through cliamp's DSP pipeline, these controls do nothing meaningful.
• No playlist management — cliamp can only see the currently playing track. It can't browse your Apple Music library or playlists (AppleScript could do this, but it would be a large expansion of scope).
• AppleScript polling — ~50-100ms per osascript invocation at 500ms intervals. Not terrible, but it's spawning a process twice a second. Position updates have visible latency compared to the native player mode.
• ScreenCaptureKit requires macOS 13+ and triggers a system permission dialog. Without it, visualizers show nothing.
• Private API fragility — the AppleScript dictionary for Music.app has been stable, but Apple could change it. ScreenCaptureKit's app-level audio filtering is public API but relatively new.
• macOS only — obviously.

My take: It works and it's fun to see the visualizer react to Apple Music. But it's a fundamentally different thing from what cliamp does — it's closer to a "Now Playing widget" than a music player. The amount of player.Engine surface area that becomes no-ops in observer mode is a code smell. Whether that complexity is worth carrying in the codebase is a design call for the maintainer.

Happy to open a PR if there's interest, or share the branch for anyone who wants to try it.

[bjarneo]

I hear you, but I am not sure if I want cliamp to become a "remote". I'll need to think about this.

[joshmedeski]

I agree, I don't think it makes sense for this project.