ApplicationMusicPlayer on macOS Ventura?

Hey there Apple Music team! I'm excited to dig into the sessions coming up this week, and what I've seen so far from the developer documentation diffs looks great: audio quality, artist images, and a way to interface with a user's music library in MusicKit. Love it!

The thing at the very top of my WWDC wishlist this year was macOS/Mac Catalyst support for the ApplicationMusicPlayer class. I just got finished installing Ventura and Xcode 14, and sadly it looks like the support story is the same as on Big Sur. No API availability on macOS, and an available Mac Catalyst API that ultimately results in the same error from a feedback I submitted on Big Sur: FB9851840

The connection to service named com.apple.Music.MPMusicPlayerApplicationControllerInternal was invalidated: failed at lookup with error 3 - No such process.

Is that the end of the story on Ventura, or is there a chance support might be added in a later beta? Is there any additional detail at all that can be shared? I field several requests a week asking if/when my app is coming to the Mac, and I would really love to be able to make that happen. If there is anything at all I can do to test and help overcome the engineering challenges alluded to in the past, I am ready, willing, and able!

In any case, thanks for the great work, and I'm looking forward to spending time with the new stuff this summer.

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talkingsmall
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Hello @talking small,

Thank you very much for your interest in MusicKit and macOS Ventura!

We are determined to shipping more functionality in MusicKit over time on all Apple platforms, wherever possible, and we are keenly aware of the fact that some of the highest value APIs in the framework are not currently available on macOS, such as ApplicationMusicPlayer.

That said, this year leading up to WWDC22 was one full of developments for MusicKit, with many new features added, such as:

Please check out our new WWDC22 session video Explore more content with MusicKit that goes into all these and more into greater detail.

With a limited number of engineers working on MusicKit, we just weren't in a favorable position to tackle a project as large as the one to bring ApplicationMusicPlayer to macOS this year.

Furthermore, in this new context with MusicKit now supporting items from the user's music library as first-class citizens, we want to make sure those would be well supported in any expansion of the list of supported platforms for key APIs in the framework, like playback and library APIs.

Therefore, the only thing we are able to say about this topic is exactly what we already said in this earlier thread: we are still investigating the issues that impact music playback on macOS, and we will keep you posted when we have an update.

We value your feedback, and it's very clear to us that this is one of the most often requested features for MusicKit.

Best regards,

Posted by
JoeKun
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  • Thanks, @JoeKun, for providing this additional context on the macOS situation. As always, I appreciate your dedication to developer relations on the forums. The list of what’s new in MusicKit this year is indeed impressive. I’m still digesting everything, and the “Explore more content with MusicKit” was an excellent showcase of the new functionality. I’m looking forward to more updates on this issue as time goes by, and have marked this post solved.

    —
    talkingsmall

  • I have to assume I'm missing something here but ... is there a way to control volume from an ApplicationMusicPlayer in macOS? MPVolumeView is unavailable. There appears to be no way to get access to the AVPlayer or whatever object is doing the actual playback. And I can't figure out a way to just control all audio being played from my application either (is there a way?).

    Is there a recommendation here? Because playing music at full system volume seems like a non-starter.

    Thanks!

    —
    macrovision12
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Hello @talking small,

Thank you very much for your interest in MusicKit and macOS Ventura!

We are determined to shipping more functionality in MusicKit over time on all Apple platforms, wherever possible, and we are keenly aware of the fact that some of the highest value APIs in the framework are not currently available on macOS, such as ApplicationMusicPlayer.

That said, this year leading up to WWDC22 was one full of developments for MusicKit, with many new features added, such as:

Please check out our new WWDC22 session video Explore more content with MusicKit that goes into all these and more into greater detail.

With a limited number of engineers working on MusicKit, we just weren't in a favorable position to tackle a project as large as the one to bring ApplicationMusicPlayer to macOS this year.

Furthermore, in this new context with MusicKit now supporting items from the user's music library as first-class citizens, we want to make sure those would be well supported in any expansion of the list of supported platforms for key APIs in the framework, like playback and library APIs.

Therefore, the only thing we are able to say about this topic is exactly what we already said in this earlier thread: we are still investigating the issues that impact music playback on macOS, and we will keep you posted when we have an update.

We value your feedback, and it's very clear to us that this is one of the most often requested features for MusicKit.

Best regards,

Posted by
JoeKun
Up vote reply of JoeKun Down vote reply of JoeKun
Post marked as solved

  • Thanks, @JoeKun, for providing this additional context on the macOS situation. As always, I appreciate your dedication to developer relations on the forums. The list of what’s new in MusicKit this year is indeed impressive. I’m still digesting everything, and the “Explore more content with MusicKit” was an excellent showcase of the new functionality. I’m looking forward to more updates on this issue as time goes by, and have marked this post solved.

    —
    talkingsmall

  • I have to assume I'm missing something here but ... is there a way to control volume from an ApplicationMusicPlayer in macOS? MPVolumeView is unavailable. There appears to be no way to get access to the AVPlayer or whatever object is doing the actual playback. And I can't figure out a way to just control all audio being played from my application either (is there a way?).

    Is there a recommendation here? Because playing music at full system volume seems like a non-starter.

    Thanks!

    —
    macrovision12
Add a Comment

Hi team, we're a year on and the MPMusicPlayerController is still as nascent as it was back then (especially on macOS). Are there any plans to prioritise the framework from an app developer's perspective instead of just developing it specifically in the context of Apple Music itself?

Developers really want to support Apple Music in their applications but issues like this make it really really hard to justify.

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PatQuinn
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