Tuneful Review: Is It Worth $4.99?

Tuneful is a $4.99 one-time purchase on the Mac App Store: a native menu bar and notch controller for Spotify and Apple Music. It shows the current track, gives you playback controls without switching windows, and scrobbles to Last.fm. For anyone who wants Spotify or Apple Music parked in the notch instead of buried in the Dock, it does that job well. It is not built to remember anything once a track ends, and that is worth knowing before you buy.

What Does Tuneful Actually Do?

Tuneful is a native Swift and SwiftUI app built by developer Martin Fekete. It sits in your Mac's menu bar, or in the notch on MacBooks that have one, and shows whatever is currently playing in Spotify or Apple Music: track title, artist, and album art. From there you get play, pause, skip, shuffle, repeat, and volume controls, plus the ability to favourite a song without opening either streaming app. It requires macOS 14.0 or later and picks up macOS Tahoe's Liquid Glass styling automatically.

Is the Notch Integration Actually Useful?

This is Tuneful's best feature. On a MacBook with a notch, hovering near it reveals album art and playback controls right where your eyes already are, no extra window, no Dock icon to click. You can set how the notch behaves on hover, choose from several menu bar styles, and pick between a few different mini player designs if you would rather have a small floating window instead. Trackpad gestures let you swipe to skip tracks, and Tuneful pulls a dominant colour from the album art to theme the interface around whatever is playing. None of this is essential, but it is polished, and it is the kind of detail that makes a menu bar utility feel worth paying for rather than free with ads.

How Good Is Tuneful's Last.fm Scrobbling?

Tuneful connects to both Spotify and Last.fm accounts, so scrobbles go out automatically as you listen, and favouriting works across the two services (Apple Music favourites apply instantly, Spotify favourites need a one-time setup step). If Last.fm is where you already track your listening stats, this is a genuine convenience: one app handles the connection instead of relying on Spotify's own scrobbling or a separate menu bar scrobbler.

The scrobble itself, though, lives entirely on Last.fm's servers once it is sent. Tuneful does not keep its own copy. If you want to see what you scrobbled last Tuesday, you are opening Last.fm's website or app, not Tuneful. That is standard behaviour for a scrobbler, but it is a distinction worth being clear about: Tuneful sends data outward, it does not store a history locally for you to browse back through.

What Tuneful Doesn't Do

Tuneful is built around the present, not the past. A few limitations follow directly from that:

• No local listening history. Once a track finishes, Tuneful has no record it happened. There is no browsable list of what played an hour ago, yesterday, or last week.
• Nothing to resume. Tuneful shows you what is playing right now. It has no concept of a podcast episode you stopped halfway through, or a track you want to pick back up later at a specific point.
• Music streaming only. Tuneful supports Spotify and Apple Music. It has no coverage for podcasts, YouTube, SoundCloud, or anything playing in a browser tab.
• Scrobbles are Last.fm's, not yours. Your listening record exists on Last.fm's servers, tied to a Last.fm account, not as a private file on your Mac.

None of this is a flaw exactly. Tuneful was never pitched as a history tool. It is a controller, and every one of these gaps is the natural result of solving a narrower problem well rather than a broader one poorly.

Who Is Tuneful For?

Tuneful makes the most sense if you live in Spotify or Apple Music, use a notched MacBook, and want quick controls without leaving whatever you are working on. It is also a good fit if you already scrobble to Last.fm and want one native app handling that connection instead of a separate scrobbler running alongside your player of choice. If your listening is entirely inside one or two apps and you never need to look backward, Tuneful covers the whole job.

It makes less sense if a meaningful share of what you listen to or watch happens outside Spotify and Apple Music, in podcasts, YouTube, or other browser tabs, or if you regularly lose track of something you were halfway through and want it back. Tuneful was not built to solve that, and does not claim to.

Is Tuneful Worth $4.99?

Yes, for what it sets out to do. The notch integration alone is worth the price if you use a MacBook with one: it turns dead screen space into a genuinely useful control surface, and the customisation options go further than most menu bar utilities bother with. Last.fm scrobbling is a real bonus rather than an afterthought. As a one-time purchase with no subscription, the cost is low enough that the value case is easy to make even if you only use half the features.

Where it is not worth it is if you were hoping for something it was never designed to be: a record of what you have played, or a way to jump back into something you stopped partway through. Tuneful's entire job is the current track. Judged against that job, it earns its price.

A Different Job: Remembering What You Played

If what actually sent you looking for an app like Tuneful was losing track of a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or a song you heard three days ago, that is a different problem than Tuneful solves, and it is the one Echo is built for. Echo runs on the Mac, records everything you play across native apps and the browser, and lets you resume any of it at the exact spot with Command-Shift-E. It keeps that history entirely on your device, no account, nothing sent anywhere.

Tuneful and Echo are not really substitutes for each other, and this review is not the place to relitigate that. For the full side-by-side on price, features, and what each one is actually for, see Echo vs Tuneful.