Beardie is a free, open-source Mac menu-bar utility that lets you control almost any media player on your machine — pause, skip, adjust volume, fetch track metadata — all from a unified set of keyboard shortcuts, without ever switching windows.
What is Beardie?
Beardie is a lightweight macOS menu-bar app that bridges your keyboard to whichever media player happens to be running, eliminating the need to hunt down the right window every time a track changes. It lives silently in the menu bar, consuming almost no resources, and springs to life the moment you tap a hotkey.
The project is fully open-source and actively maintained on GitHub under the Stillness-2 account, which means you can audit every line of code and trust that nothing unexpected is phoning home. For privacy-conscious power users, that alone makes it worth a look.
What does Beardie do best?
Beardie shines as a universal media remote — it does not care whether you are playing a FLAC in Vox, streaming a podcast in Overcast, watching a video in IINA, or scrubbing through a YouTube tab in Safari. One consistent set of keyboard shortcuts governs all of them.
I use it primarily because my workflow bounces between IINA for local video, Spotify for background music, and the occasional YouTube rabbit hole. Before Beardie, pausing meant either hunting for the right window or remembering which system hotkey each app respected — which they did inconsistently. With Beardie running, a single keystroke pauses whatever is loudest. That is the killer feature: you define the shortcut once and forget which player is active.
- Play / pause across multiple simultaneous players
- Next and previous track navigation
- Volume and mute control without touching the active window
- Now-playing metadata surfaced directly in the menu bar
- App-priority rules so you can choose which player wins when two are running
Is Beardie free?
Yes — Beardie is completely free to download and use. There is no paid tier, no subscription, and no in-app purchase. Because it is open-source (MIT-licensed on GitHub), the source code is publicly available and the app will remain free indefinitely.
Installation is straightforward via Homebrew Cask (brew install --cask beardie) or by grabbing the latest release directly from the GitHub releases page.
Who should use Beardie?
Beardie is built for Mac power users who juggle multiple media apps throughout the day and refuse to break keyboard flow just to click a play button. If your muscle memory lives on the keyboard and you resent reaching for the mouse to pause a video mid-thought, this tool was made for you.
It is equally valuable for anyone who runs video-heavy workflows — video editors previewing cuts in IINA while a reference track plays in QuickTime, or developers who keep a coding playlist in Spotify while watching tutorial videos in a corner window. The app-priority system means you can teach Beardie exactly which player to favour in any given context.
Novice users who stick to a single media app and are happy with that app's own hotkeys will not need it. But if you have ever been annoyed that macOS's native media keys only respond to whichever player grabbed focus last, Beardie is the fix.
How does Beardie compare to NepTunes or Bowtie?
NepTunes is the closest spiritual sibling: it also lives in the menu bar and surfaces now-playing metadata, but its primary hook is Touch Bar integration and Apple Music / Spotify specifically. Beardie covers a broader roster of players, and on modern MacBooks without a Touch Bar, NepTunes's headline feature is irrelevant.
Bowtie focuses on desktop widgets for track artwork and metadata display — it is more of a visual now-playing overlay than a control hub. If you want something to look at, Bowtie wins; if you want something to act on without touching the mouse, Beardie wins.
Against simply remapping the system media keys in Karabiner-Elements, Beardie offers out-of-the-box multi-player awareness that Karabiner alone cannot replicate without significant custom scripting.
What are the best Beardie alternatives?
If Beardie does not fit your workflow, the most credible alternatives are NepTunes (Apple Music / Spotify focus, Touch Bar), Nuage (volume mixer with per-app control), and Silenz (focused purely on volume management). For users locked into the Apple ecosystem, the native Now Playing widget in Control Centre covers basic pause/skip for Apple Music and Podcasts but ignores third-party players entirely. Beardie's edge is breadth: it plays well with IINA, VLC, QuickTime, Vox, Spotify, and more simultaneously.
