media_change event not firing

[wzxu]

Not 100% sure it's OS upgrade related since I'm changing my config quite a lot in the past few days and I can't remember when my nowplaying widget stopped to show, but I think it is caused by my upgrading to latest macOS Sequoia 15.4.

Now media_change no longer triggers (I test this by echo-ing date and $INFO into a log file in the script and play/pause a few times, but I would only see one line outputted by the initialization). Tried rebooting and with Spotify, Music, browsers etc. and none worked.

[MrJarnould]

The cause of this is due to updating to macOS Sequoia 15.4. Others are also facing this issue. I do not know how to resolve this.

kirtan-shah/nowplaying-cli#28

TheBoredTeam/boring.notch#417

https://community.folivora.ai/t/mediaplay-cannot-be-detected-by-btt/42910

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/beware-upgrading-to-macos-15-4-if-you-need-now-playing-data/40285

[wzxu]

Thanks. The boring.notch thread has more info and it seems they have to find a workaround since the original method is now restricted by Apple. TheBoredTeam/boring.notch#417 (comment)

[Silibop]

Unfortunately the solution they found (manually controlling individual music players) doesn’t support arbitrary media_change events from the entire OS, so while a solution, it’s definitely not perfect.

[AIboy996]

Same Issue

[wzxu]

NotchNook updated and now only supports Apple Music and Spotify too, so I suspect they do the same as boring.notch.
I'm afraid there won't be "perfect" solution onwards since Apple deliberately blocked the API for security.
As long as it can be made to work with Apple Music / Spotify I'm good.

[philikarus]

Same issue. media_change event can not be triggered since Mac OS has been updated to 15.4

[wzxu]

In the meantime, I made a workaround with AppleScript to watch for Spotify change every 2 seconds and then trigger a custom sketchybar event spotify_change if things change. Obviously polling like this is not as elegant, but it works great for me and the CPU/battery usage is basically negligible, so I thought I'd share parts of it as sample in case anyone wants it.

https://gist.github.com/wzxu/ef964559bbad2a6525a2b16a465ab5f0

• AppleScript spotify_change.scpt to start just one process which lives in the background to check with Spotify every 2 seconds.
• In sketchybarrc, start spotify_change.scpt automatically (change path to where you put it), add a now playing item, subscribe to spotify_change event and prepare a script nowplaying.sh to handle it.
• In nowplaying.sh, you get environment variables $STATE (playing/paused), $ARTIST, $TITLE, and $ARTWORK_URL. In my example, I download the thumbnail image to /tmp so I can show it on the bar.

[FelixKratz]

For spotify there is a Notification that used to work just fine when registering for it like shown here:
https://github.com/nicolas-martin/awesome-sketchybar/blob/master/plugins/Spotify-Player-Controls.md

[wzxu]

For spotify there is a Notification that used to work just fine when registering for it like shown here: https://github.com/nicolas-martin/awesome-sketchybar/blob/master/plugins/Spotify-Player-Controls.md

Wow so Spotify does this by itself? That's cool. Will surely make use of that. Thanks!

EDIT: Totally works. Now it's perfectly event-based again and no more polling. To be honest I only use media_change for Spotify so I'm happy now.

[LukasSefcik]

Same problem here. I am using Apple Music and media_change is not firing.