Guides & How-Tos

How to see everything you've played today on Mac

By the Echo team · 17 June 2026 · 4 min read

There is no single screen on a Mac that shows everything you played today. Your plays are split across Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and Apple Podcasts, each with its own short history. Here is how to check each one, and how to get a single timeline of your whole day in one place.

It is a strangely hard question to answer: what did I play today? You know you had a podcast on this morning, a couple of YouTube videos at lunch and music all afternoon, but there is nowhere to look that shows the lot. Each app holds a sliver of the answer, and stitching them together by hand is exactly the chore Echo was built to remove.

Where each app hides today's plays

If you want to do it the manual way, here is where to look in each app:

Four lists, four formats, no overlap

Checking each app gives you four partial answers in four different layouts, and browser video that didn't come from these apps is missing entirely.

Why doesn't my Mac just show all of it?

Because macOS has no shared media history. There is no system log of "things played," so there is nothing for a single view to read from. Each app remembers its own corner and nothing joins them up, which is why "everything I played today" has never had a home on the Mac.

How to see everything you played today, in one place

Echo records what you play across your native apps and the browser into one timeline on your Mac. Open it and today's plays are all there in order: the morning podcast, the lunchtime videos, the afternoon albums, regardless of which app or tab they came from. Press ⌘⇧E and you can also search the whole history by title, artist, show or channel, then resume any of it at the exact second with a tap.

Because it is on-device and private, that daily picture stays on your Mac, and it is complete: browser videos sit next to app plays in the same list, not in a separate place you have to remember to check.

Great for "what was that thing earlier?"

The track you half-noticed at 11am or the video a colleague shared is still right there in the timeline, ready to reopen.

From today to any day

Once your plays live in one history, "today" is just the top of it. You can scroll back to last week, or search for something from a month ago when you only remember the artist. It turns a daily guessing game into a record you can actually rely on, the way a single resume list changes how you pick things back up.

Frequently asked

How do I see everything I played today on my Mac?
There is no built-in single list. You would check each app's history separately: Spotify recently played, YouTube watch history, Apple Music history and Apple Podcasts. Echo gathers all of them into one searchable timeline on your Mac, so you can see everything you played today in one place.
Does macOS keep a history of what I played?
No. macOS has no system-wide media history. Each app keeps its own, and they do not combine. That is why seeing your full day of plays normally means opening several apps and websites.
Can I search what I played by artist or title?
In Echo, yes. You press Command-Shift-E and type any title, artist, show or channel, and it finds the play across every source. Native app histories only let you scroll their own recent list.
Does it include browser video, not just music apps?
Yes. Echo records browser media too, including YouTube, Spotify Web, SoundCloud and any web audio or video, alongside your native apps.
Written by the Echo team

We build Echo, a native macOS app that remembers everything you play across your apps and your browser, and brings any of it back at the exact spot with one keystroke.

Your whole day, in one timeline

Echo keeps one searchable history of everything you play, so nothing you played today is ever lost.

One-time purchase, yours forever.
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