Try This Software: DaftMusic

I’ve been using Apple’s bundled music player app since I purchased my first iBook in 2003, back when it was called iTunes and only had a few features. Over following decade, Apple absolutely crammed iTunes full of new features (podcasts, the Music Store, iPod and iPhone syncing, Ping “social networking” and a ton more), all while never dramatically improving the interface to properly handle everything it could do. With macOS Catalina, Apple retired iTunes and split it into separate apps: Music, TV and Podcasts. While this was certainly better (narrowing the features of each app to their intended purpose), the new Music app itself felt more like a Catalyst version of its iOS counterpart, and the six intervening years of development haven’t improved it much.

When Liquid Glass was applied as part of macOS 26, things got worse still. Using Music on macOS today is a clunky, uneven experience where paddings are all different, readability issues with glass overlays run rampant, and general UX is complex or buggy.

I came across DaftMusic recently and was impressed by how subtly the UI utilized glass elements, and just how clean the structure was. Paddings are uniform. Fonts and colors feel coherent and purposeful. The app is playful in just the right ways, but also highly efficient and usable. It looks nice, and it works really well. And, because it works both Apple Music or Spotify accounts, you can simply play the music you want from the service you already use.

I’ve really enjoyed listing to music again on macOS with DaftMusic. Small, highly polished, focused apps like these are my favorite types of software. If you use Apple Music (or Spotify), I’d recommend you check out DaftMusic.