macOS menu-bar player

Reed

SoundCloud, reduced to a personal music launcher that lives in your menu bar.

Your likes, playlists, feed, and the artists you follow — one click away, playing instantly. No browser tab, no dock icon.

Install with Homebrew
$brew install --cask kobylinski/tap/reed
macOS 13+ Free · MIT Download .zip
S.P.Y x Etherwood — Because of You
Hospital Records
Foals — Spanish Sahara
Sub Pop
Crosses — The Epilogue
José González
girl in red x Joy Division [mashup]
robert lilly
Likes
Playlist
Feed
Following
Marek Kobyliński
Quit⌘Q

Playback

  • Mini-player with a seekable waveform — click to scrub
  • Prev · play · next, plus shuffle & repeat
  • Recently played — jump back a track or three
  • DJ mode — equal-power crossfade between songs
  • Radio — an endless station from any track
  • Like or unlike anything inline

Sources

  • Likes — your whole library, hundreds deep
  • Playlists — type to search, scroll to pick
  • Feed — your stream of new posts
  • Following — play any artist you follow

Native

  • Now Playing + hardware media keys
  • Streams SoundCloud HLS AAC via AVPlayer
  • Reopens right where you left off
  • Lucide icons that adapt to light & dark
  • Sign in with OAuth 2.1 + PKCE
One thing
to know

You'll need SoundCloud Artist Pro

SoundCloud reopened API access in June 2026, but getting your own credentials needs a paid Artist Pro plan — a free profile can't register an app, so Pro is what lets Reed connect to your account. Check or activate it at soundcloud.com/pro.

Open source · MIT

Missing something? Add it yourself.

Reed is one Swift package — no Xcode project, a few thousand readable lines, built and bundled with a single script. The whole thing is small enough to hold in your head.

Want another source, a keyboard shortcut, a different crossfade curve, an icon that's more you? Clone it, change it, run ./scripts/bundle.sh, and it's yours. Pull requests are welcome — forks that wander off in their own direction, even more so.

Sources/Reed/ ├── AppDelegate.swift # menu wiring ├── PlaybackEngine.swift # dual-AVPlayer queue + crossfade ├── Auth/ # OAuth 2.1 + PKCE ├── API/ # the SoundCloud client └── UI/ # mini-player, panel, icons