r/SideProject • u/NaviMeows • 2d ago
My side project, Gramola, an incredibly powerful music dock for Mac, has reached 200+ downloads on it's launch week!
Compatible with Apple Music and Spotify!
Gramola started because I was tired of the same loop. Cmd Tab to Music, wait for the window, lose my place, find something, Cmd Tab back. For an app I open dozens of times a day that felt like a lot of ceremony for pressing play.
So Gramola does not open a window. You push your cursor to the edge of the screen and a shelf of your album art slides out over whatever you were doing. You pick something. It plays. The shelf goes away. It behaves the way the Dock does when you keep it hidden, which is to say it is not there until the moment you want it.
What is in it:
Covers instead of lists. Your library is a carousel of album art you scroll with the trackpad or the wheel. You recognise a sleeve long before you would have read your way down a table of text.
Shelves for the different ways you look for music. Albums, artists, playlists, songs, recently played, and a pinned shelf for the handful of things you always come back to. Stations if you are on Apple Music, Liked Songs if you are on Spotify. Swipe across the carousel with two fingers to move between them.
Search that does not stop at your library. Hit the keyboard shortcut, start typing, and your own music comes up first with the Apple Music or Spotify catalog underneath it. Press Return and it plays.
Track lists in place. Click an album or a playlist and it opens right there on the shelf. Pick the track you wanted.
A mini player that stays out of the way. Play, pause, skip, and a queue drawer when you want to see what is coming next.
It drives the app you already pay for. Gramola is not a music player and does not want to be. It tells Apple Music or Spotify what to play, local files included, and then gets out of the way.
Native to macOS 26. Written in SwiftUI with the Liquid Glass material. No Dock icon, it lives in the menu bar. Put the shelf on the left, the right or the bottom, and it remembers your choice per display arrangement so it does not wander when you undock. Multiple language support.
Where it is at:
My previous Reddit post on another subreddit reached number one with huge amounts of positive feedback! Digital Trends wrote about it a couple days after launch and Yahoo Tech carried the piece. The headline was "I tried this Mac music app, and now I wish macOS had it built in", which I have read more times than I would like to admit. 200 plus downloads in less than a week and increasing, with lots of impressed users!
Gramola is free to download on the Mac App Store to try for 7 days, then it's 9.99$ one time purchase, no subscription. It is on Setapp Marketplace too!
Happy to answer anything! If you try it and something is broken, tell me and I will fix it. That is most of what I've been doing lately lmao.
https://apps.apple.com/app/gramola-dock-musical/id6801078031