Effective 29 October 2026. Music Remote for Mac is made by Goudsmit Technologies.
In short: Music Remote collects no personal data, has no accounts, no analytics and no ads, and sends nothing to us. It talks to your own Macs and receiver on your home network. The only thing that leaves your network is a lookup of missing album artwork at Apple.
What stays on your Macs
Music Remote has two parts: the menu bar app, and a helper that runs on the Mac that plays the music (Settings → This Mac). They talk to each other directly, over your local network. The helper refuses connections from outside your local network, and requests from web browsers.
What they keep is stored on your own Macs and never sent to us:
- Settings: the Macs you connected to (their names, addresses and, for waking them, their network hardware addresses), your receiver’s address, and your preferences.
- Access tokens, only for helpers set up to require one: in your login keychain.
- Up Next and album artwork: the helper’s queue and a cache of album covers, in its Application Support folder, together with a log of what it did.
Deleting the app and these folders removes all of it.
What goes to Apple
- Missing artwork. Music only hands over artwork for songs stored on the Mac. For other songs, the helper asks Apple’s public iTunes Search service for the cover, by sending the artist, album and song title. Apple sees that request, including your IP address, as with any request to its servers; Apple’s privacy policy applies. Covers are cached so the same album isn’t looked up again.
- Crash reports, for the Mac App Store version, and only if you chose to share analytics with app developers in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. Apple then passes crash reports on to us, without information that identifies you.
On your network
- Your Macs: the app finds them with Bonjour, and can wake one with a Wake-on-LAN message.
- A Yamaha receiver, if you set one up: the app controls it directly, and can look for it on the network.
None of this goes beyond your local network.
Permissions
macOS asks before Music Remote may:
- control Music, on the Mac that plays the music (Automation);
- find devices on your local network;
- show notifications when the song changes.
You can change these at any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and under Notifications.
Downloads
If you download Music Remote from GitHub or install it with Homebrew, GitHub’s privacy statement covers that download. The Mac App Store version is covered by Apple’s privacy policy.
Children
Music Remote collects no data from anyone, children included.
Changes and questions
If this policy changes, the new version will be here, with its date. Questions? Open an issue on GitHub or use the contact button on goudsmit.tech.