I listen to a lot of music while working and like to quickly check what’s currently playing, so I checked out MediaMate. It’s an indie app for Mac that costs €7 (about $7.50) and displays the current song either as an extension of the MacBook “notch” or as a semi-transparent pop-up. It can appear every time the song changes, every time you adjust the volume, or when you mouse over the notch.

This is useful for quickly checking what is playing, but also for finding out which media application is currently "owning" the media control keys. For example, sometimes I'll click play on an online video while also listening to music. I'll press "pause" with the intention of pausing the music, but the video will pause. This is annoying because I don't really understand what's happening, but with MediaMate I can at least see in real time which application I'm pausing and playing.

MediaMate also replaces the bulky volume and brightness popups with slimmer ones. Granted, this is a minor cosmetic change, but I appreciate it. You can even combine this with the now-play section in the notch, as seen at the top of this article. Another option is to have a slim volume display at the bottom of the screen.

All of this can be tweaked and created in the settings: you can choose from four different styles for the volume and brightness overlays, and configure quite a bit about how they all work. If you’re the type of person who likes to tweak things and aren’t completely happy with how macOS handles the volume and brightness overlays, it’s worth a download.