Echo vs Silicio: a mini player vs a media memory

Both are small Mac apps that sit close to your music, but they were built for different moments. Silicio is about now: putting whatever is currently playing into a widget or mini player you can glance at, control, and scrobble. Echo is about later: keeping a record of everything you have played, across every app and every browser tab, so you can find it again and pick it back up.

What does Silicio do well?

Silicio is a free mini player and widget app from bolz1 apps, which has been building small macOS utilities since 2010. It shows album art and track details for whatever is playing in Music, iTunes, Vox or Spotify, with a resizable desktop widget on macOS Sonoma and newer, a compact Today widget for older systems, and a floating mini player you can keep on top of other windows.

• Touch Bar controls. On MacBook Pro models with a Touch Bar, you can swipe to skip tracks and tap to play or pause without opening anything.
• Last.fm scrobbling. Silicio submits what you play to your Last.fm profile automatically, once a track has played past the halfway point, or four minutes for longer tracks.
• Wide native coverage. Through Vox, Silicio also picks up SoundCloud playback, on top of Music, iTunes and Spotify.
• Notifications. A now-playing notification appears whenever the track changes, so you can see what came on without switching apps.

If what you want is a good-looking now-playing display with Touch Bar shortcuts and automatic Last.fm scrobbling, Silicio does that well, and it costs nothing.

Does Silicio keep a history of what you have played?

Not inside the app itself. Silicio's job is to show and control the current track; once it ends, it is gone from the widget. The one place a record survives is your Last.fm profile, if you have scrobbling turned on, and that is a public web page listing track titles, not a private, searchable history you browse from your Mac. There is no way to reopen a video, resume a podcast at the second you stopped, or search for “that song from Tuesday” from inside Silicio itself.

What does Echo do that Silicio doesn't?

Echo is a media memory: a private, on-device record of everything you play, across your native apps and your browser, with no account and nothing sent off your Mac. Press Command-Shift-E and you get one searchable history of every track, episode and video, and you can resume it right where you left off.

• One history, every source. Native apps like Spotify, Apple Music and Podcasts, plus browser sources Silicio never touches: YouTube, Spotify Web, SoundCloud tabs, and general web audio or video.
• Resume, not just replay. Bring anything back to where you left off with one keystroke, including a video paused mid-scene or a podcast you stepped away from.
• Shelf. Pin half-finished items so they are waiting for you, instead of scrolling out of view.
• Moments. Bookmark a specific point in something long, like a quote in a podcast or a scene in a lecture, and jump straight back to it later.

Side by side

Which should you choose?

Choose Silicio if you mostly listen through Music, iTunes, Vox or Spotify's desktop app, want a free, good-looking now-playing widget with Touch Bar shortcuts, and you already scrobble to Last.fm or want to start. You don't need a local history to get value from it.

Choose Echo if you keep losing your place, want one searchable history across every app and browser tab, need to resume a video or podcast exactly where you stopped, or want a private record of what you played that never leaves your Mac and doesn't depend on an external scrobbling service.

You don't have to pick one. Silicio and Echo cover different ends of the same habit: what's on right now, and everything you played before it.