macOS Sequoia 15.4 beta
BTT cannot detect the media currently playing on the system.
I think this is is still true:
This happened to my Mac several days ago (after I updated my Mac to the latest Develop Beta version, maybe). The Now Playing widget (Touch Bar) and conditional group just suddenly don't work. It seems that my BTT cant detect media playing in any situation.
ah, maybe due to 15.4 beta ? Possibly apple has changed or blocked this, I‘ll need to check once I upgrade to 15.4
Very likely. I’m also using another third-party media control software, and it recently stopped being able to recognize the media playing on the system. Apple may have made it more difficult to access certain system information.
I have just implemented some workarounds in BTT 5.279 alpha (uploading). Would be great if you could check whether this works for you. It is much more complicated than before and currently doesn't support all apps but I'll add support for more in the next days.
Hey Andreas, will this work for browsers?
I added basic support for browsers, have only tested on safari so far
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I guess that these workarounds should not affect if macOS < 15.4, right?
correct
Hey @Andreas_Hegenberg, I know that most probably this is not high priority, but after 15.4 upgrade, when Safari is the app playing the media some of the BTTPlaying variables are empty. Actually only the BTTCurrentlyPlaying and BTTCurrentlyPlayingApp have some values, but only if Safari is the active app when BTT is started. When BTTCurrentlyPlayingApp is having a value is now Com.apple.WebKit.GPU, and it was com.safari.app before the upgrade.
Both of these vars become empty if I switch the active app to something else than Safari.
it should also have the title of the playing tab in BTTCurrentlyPlayingTitle (BTT might need permission to automate Safari for that)
Unfortunately with 15.4 that‘s probably all that can be retrieved ;-(
It has that permission, but yeah - not working as expected :\ . Thanks.
mhh the title is working fine here, what kind of media are you playing?
Videos from youtube.com
The interesting part is that when I play the same from Firefox - it is working, not ideal (still BTTNowPlayingInfoArtist is missing), but better compared with Safari, at least the BTTNowPlayingInfoTitle is updating and showing correct values.
I‘ll check soon (away for the rest of the week), maybe I missed something for Safari.
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Hey Andreas, by the way, is the workaround you applied for macOS >= 15.4 a fallback method or it is the only way now to get NowPlaying data? I'm just wondering if Apple "fix" (revert the change they did) this will BTT automatically use the "correct" API to get this data?
Thanks.
It's a fallback, but Apple is not going to revert this as it was a security fix (even got it's own CVE number). Problem was that any app could know whatever media you played and that info can be very sensitive.
Maybe they will provide a dedicated API at some point.
I will make more information available for Spotify and Apple Music - these are the only two that still allow to get more details. But I think for apps like Safari etc. it would require a browser extension.
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I have found a way that allows BTT to access the now playing info again. Will add it to the next version tomorrow or Monday, however I don’t know whether it will survive future macOS updates :-/
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