BrewSpin

BrewSpin turns whatever you are playing into a record spinning on your desktop - album art on the label, tonearm tracking its way through the song.

Start a song and the platter starts turning. Change the song and a new record drops. There is nothing to connect and no account to make: BrewSpin just watches the player you already use and shows you what is on.

Highlights

1. A real turntable - grooved wax, a weighted tonearm and a spindle, drawn crisp at any window size. It spins up and coasts down, and the arm lifts and cues rather than dragging across the record.
2. Your cover art on the label - the artwork of the track playing, turning with the record.
3. Apple Music and Spotify - both, picked up automatically. Whichever is playing wins.
4. The arm knows where you are - it lands on the outer groove at the start and works inward as the song plays.
5. Desktop mode - drop the deck behind your icons and let it play as living wallpaper. Clicks pass straight through to whatever you are working on.
6. Follow the artwork - the backdrop and the record both take their colours from the cover, and change with every track.
7. Eighteen backdrops, or your own picture - wood, cork, felt, stone, linen, night, and a few bright ones. Add as many pictures of your own as you like, photos straight off your phone included. Or pick Sleeve and let the cover you are playing sit blurred behind the deck.
8. The record too - classic black, clear, red, white, or a picture disc with the sleeve printed across the whole pressing. Three sizes, and you can take the tonearm off if you just want the record turning.
9. It changes the moment you do - skip a track and the scene turns over straight away, with no lag to notice.
10. Or your actual wallpaper - let the cover become your desktop picture, composed at your screen's own size over the backdrop the app is wearing. Your own wallpaper comes back the moment you turn it off.
11. Stays out of the way - lives in the menu bar, opens at login if you want it to, and hides its controls until you hover.
12. Nothing leaves your computer - no sign-in for your music, no listening history collected, no server in the middle.

How it works

Open BrewSpin and it asks once for permission to see your music player - that single yes is the whole setup. From then on it reads the track name, the artist and the cover art of whatever is playing, and nothing else.

Pause and the record slows to a stop with the arm still down, the way a real one does. Turn on desktop mode and the deck sinks behind your windows and icons; the menu bar icon brings it back whenever you want it.

Letting BrewSpin set your desktop picture asks once more, separately - that permission is what lets it change the wallpaper at all. Say no and only that one feature stays off. Say yes and your own picture is remembered first, then put back the moment you switch it off.

Perfect for

1. Long listening sessions - a second screen that is doing something better than a static photo.
2. Anyone who misses sleeves - cover art at a size you can actually see, instead of a thumbnail in a corner.
3. Working with music on - glance over to see what is playing without breaking out of what you are doing.
4. Streaming and sharing a screen - a now-playing display that looks deliberate rather than like a widget.