Heartbeat For Mac

Spotify comes with Last.fm integration, yet the service only scrobbles your tracks to your account for others to see what you are currently listening to.

Heartbeat is a small application that takes things even further by connection to your Spotify application and either playing tracks shared by others or streaming your playlist to other users that are monitoring your ID.

To be able to use the Heartbeat app, you need to make sure that you have the Spotify desktop client installed and running on your Mac. Naturally, you will also have to connect to your account to be able to listen to the tracks.

The Heartbeat app resides in your status bar and within its panel you get to either share your music or listen with someone. Depending on your choice, Heartbeat will either generate an ID to be shared with others, or prompt you to provide the ID you want to follow.

Once a connection is established, Heartbeat allows you to see the user name for the ID you are following (it will be extracted from the macOS user account). However, you will not see if there are other users following your stream or not.

In both cases, Heartbeat will display the current track’s cover art in its main panel, but not the song or artist name. The best part is that if you are following one of your friends, the app will control the Spotify app to reflect the other user’s stream, so you don’t have to interact with the app in any way.

Worth mentioning is that Heartbeat generates the ID as consecutive numbers, depending on how many users are actively using the service. Since the connection cannot be locked in any way, you can input any number up to the one generated by the app for you, and you should be able to listen to other people streams and they won’t even be aware you are following them.

Heartbeat is a simple app that establishes a connection to your Spotify desktop client and offers you the possibility to share your music preferences in real time, with as many people as you like, without going through a complicated setup.