NotchBeat Bridge

Reports what the current tab is playing to the NotchBeat menu-bar app, and lets NotchBeat control it.

NotchBeat Bridge connects music playing in your browser to NotchBeat, the Dynamic Island app for the MacBook notch. Install it and whatever you are listening to on the web appears in your notch — album art, track title, artist, a live scrubber, and working play / pause / next / previous, just as NotchBeat already does for desktop music players. WHY THE EXTENSION IS NEEDED macOS gives an app no way to see what a web page is playing. The browser is the only place that information exists. This extension reads the page's own Now Playing data and passes it to the NotchBeat app running on your own machine. HOW IT WORKS The extension reads navigator.mediaSession — the standard the page itself fills in to describe what it is playing — plus the position and play state of the media element. It sends that to NotchBeat over 127.0.0.1, which is your own computer and nowhere else. NotchBeat's reply carries any button you pressed in the island, which the extension performs by pressing the site's own control. WHERE IT WORKS Any website that describes what it is playing through the browser's standard Media Session API, which most streaming, radio and podcast sites do. Nothing needs configuring per site. Play, pause, seek and volume work wherever that information is present. Skip forward and back work on sites that expose standard, labelled next and previous controls. PRIVACY No accounts, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing sent to any server. The extension does not read, store or transmit your browsing history, page contents, form data, cookies or credentials. The only network request it ever makes is to 127.0.0.1 — your own machine. REQUIREMENTS The NotchBeat app for macOS, running. The extension does nothing on its own. After installing, reload any tabs that were already open — extensions only attach to pages as they load. The ten brand names are gone. Nothing else in the listing needs changing.