What is Echo? The media memory app for Mac, explained

Your Mac plays a lot in a day. A podcast over breakfast, focus music while you work, a YouTube tutorial, a recorded talk in a browser tab, an album you put on and loved. The trouble is that each app keeps its own shallow memory, and none of them talk to each other. The moment you close a tab or switch apps, "where was I?" becomes a hunt. Echo exists to answer that question instantly.

What is Echo?

Echo is a media memory for your Mac: a small app that lives in your menu bar and keeps one running, searchable history of everything you play. It is not a music player and not a now-playing widget. It sits behind the apps you already use and remembers what they forget, so any track, episode or video you have played is a keystroke away.

How does Echo work?

Echo watches what is playing across your apps and browser and notes where you stopped. When you want something back, you press its shortcut, search, and Echo does the rest:

1. It captures as you go. Whatever you play in a supported app or the browser is added to your history, with the spot you reached.
2. You press ⌘⇧E. A search palette appears over whatever you are doing. Start typing a title, artist or show.
3. Echo reopens it at the exact second. It launches the right app or tab and seeks straight to where you left off, so you carry on instead of starting over.

What can Echo remember?

Echo spans the two places your media actually lives, your native apps and your browser, so nothing slips between them:

• Native apps: Spotify, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud.
• The browser: YouTube, Spotify Web, SoundCloud and any web audio or video, including embedded players and conference talks.

It all lands in a single timeline you can search, rather than four separate histories you have to check one by one.

What are Moments and the Shelf?

Two features go beyond plain history. A Moment bookmarks an exact spot you want to return to, the line in a podcast or the step in a tutorial, so you can jump back to that second later. The Shelf holds the half-finished things you mean to pick up again, so a part-watched lecture or a part-listened album does not vanish into the scroll.

How is Echo different from a now-playing widget?

Apps like Sleeve and Tuneful show or control what is playing right now. They are about the present moment. Echo is about the past: getting back to anything you have played, at the spot you stopped. The two solve different problems, and plenty of people run a now-playing widget for the look and Echo for the memory.

Is Echo private?

Yes. Echo is on-device with no account and no cloud. Your history of what you played stays on your Mac and is never uploaded. We cover exactly how that works in Is Echo private? How on-device memory works.

Who is Echo for, and what does it cost?

Echo is for anyone whose day spans a lot of media and who hates losing their place: knowledge workers, heavy YouTube watchers, podcast listeners, students and researchers. It is a one-time $9.99 purchase, no subscription, covering up to three Macs with every future update included.