nowplaying-cli no longer works on macOS 15.4

[MrJarnould]

Others are also facing this issue. I do not know how to resolve this.

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

[jakmaz]

I think the only workaround now would be creating AppleScripts to get info from all the popular applications such as Spotify, Apple Music etc separately.

[SKaplanOfficial]

You can access the Now Playing info from AppleScript using the private MRNowPlayingRequest API, without specializing it for each app. I've made some demo scripts here: https://gist.github.com/SKaplanOfficial/f9f5bdd6455436203d0d318c078358de. To get it into ObjC, you'd have to use an NSUserAppleScriptTask I think, or an equivalent mechanism that runs at the user level.

[ungive]

If you need to interface with MediaRemote directly on any macOS version, including 15.4 and above, you can still load it by executing an Objective-C function from a custom framework bundle that is loaded with a platform binary, see my project here: https://github.com/ungive/mediaremote-adapter

[ungive]

I welcome you to check out my tool media-control which works on all macOS versions:

https://github.com/ungive/media-control

It does what nowplaying-cli does, but all now playing data is encoded as JSON and in addition it supports "streaming" of now playing information using the stream subcommand. If you want to try it, you can install it using brew:

$ brew tap ungive/media-control
$ brew install media-control
$ media-control help

I've added a good number of usage examples to the README, if you need some inspiration!

[kirtan-shah]

I've updated the latest release to restore support for macOS 15, 26. Thank you!

[ungive]

@kirtan-shah Just to make you aware, most of your project is now compromised of code from my mediaremote-adapter project. I would appreciate some form of acknowledgement in the documentation and release notes. One of the files in your repository is also missing a license header, which I fixed in this commit. Thank you!

[kirtan-shah]

Thank you @ungive, I pushed a commit and updated the release notes.