Apple Music, live on your Stream Deck.
Full-bleed album art on the encoder screen, a scrubbing dial, per-app volume, and one-tap playlists — control Apple Music for Windows without ever touching your keyboard.
Everything the dial and the keypad can do.
Now Playing, full bleed
Album cover fills the encoder screen, with a pause overlay when playback stops. Single click plays or pauses, double click skips forward, triple click goes back, and turning the dial moves between tracks.
Multi-artist titles, cleaned up
A comma-separated pile of names becomes Main artist feat. Second, Third, and the title scrolls in a smooth circular loop — with a 2 second pause on every lap — whenever it overflows the screen.
Volume that targets the app
Volume up, down, and mute act on Apple Music's own entry in the Windows volume mixer — your system volume and every other app stay untouched.
One tap actually starts playback
A button whose icon is the playlist or album cover opens the music:// link and drives Apple Music's own Play button through UI Automation — not a link that just opens a browser tab.
Built on native Windows APIs
Title, artist, cover art and position come from SMTC — the same API behind Windows' own now-playing widget — read through a small C# bridge the Node/TypeScript plugin queries.
A full keypad, not just a dial
Play/Pause, Previous, and Next as standalone Stream Deck buttons — for setups without an encoder, or when reaching for the dial is one gesture too many.
Works on any Elgato Stream Deck — even the one built into a keyboard.
Anything running Elgato's Stream Deck software can host these actions — a standalone Stream Deck+, or a full mechanical keyboard with one embedded, like Corsair's Galleon 100 SD: 12 Stream Deck keys, two rotary dials, and a 720×180 display, sitting right above the keys you already type on.
Elgato Explorer ↗
No scraping, no polling the UI — just the OS's own hooks.
A small C# executable, NowPlayingBridge.exe, does the Windows-side work and gets queried by the Node/TypeScript plugin that runs on your Stream Deck.
SMTC
Windows.Media.Control exposes title, artist, cover art and playback position — the same system feed behind Windows' own now-playing widget.
Core Audio
ISimpleAudioVolume targets Apple Music's own audio session — the programmatic twin of the per-app slider in the Windows volume mixer.
NowPlayingBridge.exe
A small C# executable wraps SMTC, Core Audio and UI Automation, and is queried by the Node/TypeScript plugin — the part Stream Deck actually runs.
Two ways in — pick yours.
Simple install
Download com.alexismartin.applemusic-nowplaying.streamDeckPlugin from the repo.
Double-click it — Stream Deck installs it automatically.
Local install
Restart the Stream Deck app — the actions show up under Apple Music Now Playing. npm run watch rebuilds and restarts on every change.
Worth knowing
Shuffle and Repeat can't be triggered — Apple Music for Windows doesn't expose them over SMTC. That's the app's ceiling, not the plugin's.
If something like SteelSeries Sonar remixes audio after Windows, volume control acts on the Windows session — not that software's own internal fader.