Play Apple Music in Retro Mac OS X Fashion with QuickTune

Apple Music may be a modern offering from Apple, but a super fun project from developer Mario Guzman offers a very nostalgic interface to Apple Music, giving it a QuickTime lookalike appearance from 2005. Aptly named QuickTune, you’ll find QuickTune has a super simple and fun retro brushed metal interface to interact with Apple Music on your Mac.

If you’ve been a Mac user for long enough, you likely have fond memories of the brief but beloved brushed metal interface of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), and perhaps you even once used QuickTime Player to play music and videos sometime around 2005. With QuickTune, you can relive that experience, but with the conveniences and modern playlists you’ve already curated with Apple Music.

Using QuickTune as a Retro-themed Apple Music Player on Mac

Getting QuickTune up and running as the Apple Music frontend on your Mac is very easy, here’s all you need to do:

1. Grab QuickTune from the developer free here
2. Launch Apple Music on the Mac, and then launch QuickTune
3. Grant permission to QuickTune to be able to control Apple Music
4. Now you’re ready to use QuickTune as an Apple Music interface on the Mac

Playlists, play, pause, back, forward, volume up/down slider, and repeat, all work as expected.

You can use the smaller condensed player, or the larger player with album art:

Note that if you do not launch Apple Music, which QuickTune depends on, you will see a little message stating that Apple Music is not open, instead of a track name. This is because QuickTune is a frontend to interacting with Apple Music, and not a dedicated independent music player.

QuickTune works on modern versions of MacOS including Sonoma, Ventura, Big Sur, and newer, and on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

And yes this fun little app only works to interact with Apple Music. As primarily a Spotify user myself, I kind of wish that QuickTune (and the other neat retro utilities offered by the same dev) would also work as frontends to Spotify, or any other music playing on the Mac for that matter, but that’s a big ask, especially for fun free hobby projects like these.

It’s no secret that we’re fans of retro Apple and computing in general around here, and if you are too then you’ll probably get a kick out of exploring our other retro-themed articles here.