Stop Please is a menu-bar utility for macOS 15 or later that pauses everything that is playing, and later resumes only what it paused.
Ever tried pausing your music in Spotify or YouTube Music after hovering over a YouTube thumbnail, or after watching a YouTube video? Play/Pause no longer reaches your music, because Spotify or YouTube Music is no longer the macOS Now Playing app.
So I built Stop Please. With a single shortcut, Shift + Play/Pause, it pauses every app that is playing: watching a video while listening to music pauses both. The next press resumes exactly those apps. It works with any app that appears in Now Playing, with nothing to set up per app.
- Pauses every playing app with one shortcut and remembers them as a group
- Resumes that group with the next press, even if another app has since become the Now Playing app
- Keeps up to three groups; when there are several, a chooser picks which one to resume
- Lists every Now Playing source in the menu; click one to pause or play just that app
- Works with the apps as installed: no plugins, no per-app setup, nothing injected into them
- Lightweight: about 35 MB of memory, practically no CPU while idle, and a download of about 1 MB. No network access and no analytics
Requires macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.
- Install with Homebrew,
brew install --cask chengandre/tap/stop-please, or downloadStopPlease-<version>.dmgfrom Releases and drag Stop Please! to Applications. - Open the app. It is not notarized, so macOS blocks the first launch: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway next to the message about Stop Please, and confirm.
Stop Please lives in the menu bar and has no Dock icon. To build from source, see DEVELOPMENT.md.
A setup window asks you to choose your shortcut:
- Shift + Play/Pause: needs Accessibility (see Permissions). Until it is granted, ⌃⌥⌘P works instead.
- Keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘P: no permission needed.
Closing the window chooses the keyboard shortcut. Either choice can be changed later in Settings.
Each press looks at what is playing first:
| Situation | Press |
|---|---|
| Something is playing | Pauses every playing app and saves them as a new group |
| Nothing is playing, one group saved | Resumes that group |
| Nothing is playing, two or three groups saved | Opens the chooser |
| Nothing is playing, no groups saved | Plays the current Now Playing app, like the Play/Pause key |
Groups:
- At most three are kept, newest first. A fourth replaces the oldest.
- A resumed group is removed, and so is one whose apps have all quit or are already playing. A group that failed to resume is kept so you can try again.
- A group never changes after it is saved, and only apps still paused are resumed.
- Groups are kept in memory and are cleared when Stop Please quits.
- Now Playing lists every source with its app icon, title, and state.
- Pause All Playing does the same as the shortcut when something is playing; the shortcut is shown on its right.
- Resume lists the saved groups by the time they were paused; click one to resume it.
- Clicking a Now Playing row pauses or plays only that app and never creates or changes a group.
- Hovering over a group shows each app with the title it was playing when paused.
- When something could not be paused or resumed, the reason appears under the groups.
Opens in the middle of the screen when there are several groups to resume.
- ↑/↓ or Tab/⇧Tab to move, Return or a click to resume
- Esc or a click outside to dismiss
A small pill near the bottom of the screen shows Paused or Resumed with the affected apps' icons, then fades. An app that did not respond is dimmed with a "!" and its reason is in the menu.
Open Settings… from the menu (⌘,) to choose between the two shortcuts and record either one:
- Keyboard: a letter, number, symbol, or F-key with at least one of ⌘, ⌃, or ⌥.
- Media key: Play/Pause is fixed; hold the modifiers you want and release them to save. Shift alone is allowed.
Only the chosen shortcut responds, and both recordings are kept. The ↺ button after each one restores its default (⌃⌥⌘P or Shift + Play/Pause).
Launch at login (under General) starts Stop Please when you log in. It is off by default; once it is ticked, Stop Please appears in System Settings → General → Login Items, where it can also be switched off.
Export Log… (under Troubleshooting) saves Stop Please's recent log as a text file to attach to a bug report; see Reporting a problem.
The keyboard shortcut needs no permission, and neither does anything else in the app except the media-key shortcut.
Shift + Play/Pause needs Accessibility. Stop Please has to take the key before your player sees it; otherwise the player would also toggle. When it is chosen, macOS asks for the permission. While it is missing, the keyboard shortcut works instead and the menu shows Accessibility Needed…, which asks for the permission again or opens its page in System Settings. The switch back happens as soon as the permission is granted, without a relaunch.
No other permissions are requested: no Input Monitoring, no Automation, no screen or audio recording.
To update, quit Stop Please and replace the app in Applications with the new one. With Homebrew, run brew upgrade --cask stop-please.
Every release is signed with the same certificate, so the Accessibility permission carries over to the new version.
To uninstall, quit Stop Please, delete it from Applications, and remove it from the Accessibility list if it is there. With Homebrew, brew uninstall --zap stop-please removes the app and its preferences; remove it from the Accessibility list yourself.
Now Playing is managed by a system service, mediaremoted, through Apple's private MediaRemote framework. Since macOS 15.4, the service hides other apps' Now Playing information from ordinary apps. Processes with an Apple identity are exempt, so Stop Please runs a small helper inside the system Perl (/usr/bin/perl, signed by Apple as com.apple.perl) and talks to it over a pipe.
The helper:
- Lists every Now Playing source with its app, process, state, and title.
- Targets one app by briefly making it the system's Now Playing app (the "override"), sending an explicit Play or Pause, and clearing the override. When the target is already the Now Playing app, it sends the command directly. A command takes about 30 ms.
- Recognizes a paused app later by its process ID and identity, and checks both in a fresh list before every command.
You will see a perl process in Activity Monitor while Stop Please runs; that is the helper.
For example, a pause while Spotify plays, after a YouTube preview became the Now Playing app, looks like this:
%%{init: {"sequence": {"mirrorActors": false}}}%%
sequenceDiagram
participant App as Stop Please
participant Helper as helper (Perl)
participant MR as mediaremoted
participant Spotify
Note left of App: Shift + Play/Pause
App->>Helper: list
Helper-->>App: Spotify: Playing
App->>Helper: pause Spotify
rect rgba(128, 128, 128, 0.15)
Note over Helper,MR: override window
Helper->>MR: set override
Helper->>MR: Pause
MR->>Spotify: Pause
MR-->>Helper: sent
Helper->>MR: clear override
end
MR-->>Helper: Paused
Helper-->>App: done
Note left of App: shows "Paused"
The helper waits until Spotify is the Now Playing app before sending, and skips the override entirely when it already is.
StopPlease/ Swift menu-bar app
├── App/
│ ├── main.swift
│ ├── AppDelegate.swift startup and wiring
│ ├── LaunchAtLogin.swift the login item
│ └── LogExport.swift Export Log… for bug reports
├── NowPlaying/
│ ├── HelperProtocol.swift messages exchanged with the helper
│ ├── HelperClient.swift starts, supervises, and restarts the helper
│ └── Coordinator.swift saved groups, actions, and what the confirmation shows
├── Shortcuts/
│ ├── GlobalShortcut.swift keyboard shortcut
│ ├── MediaKeyTap.swift Shift + Play/Pause and the Accessibility check
│ └── ShortcutController.swift which shortcut is chosen and active
├── UI/
│ ├── MenuBarController.swift menu
│ ├── GroupChooser.swift chooser panel
│ ├── ConfirmationPill.swift confirmation pill
│ └── AppIconCache.swift app icons for the menu, chooser, and pill
├── Windows/
│ ├── SettingsWindow.swift Settings and both recorders
│ └── SetupWindow.swift first-launch setup
├── Info.plist turns on the localized name (other keys are generated)
├── en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings the localized name Finder shows: Stop Please!
└── Assets.xcassets/ menu-bar and app icons
NowPlayingPerlHelper/
├── perl_helper.m helper library: every MediaRemote call
└── perl_helper.pl loads the library into /usr/bin/perl
tests/
├── perl_acceptance.py acceptance tests against real players
└── helper_smoke.py starts the bundled helper and lists sources
assets/ icon source (icon.svg), README banners, and screenshots
project.yml XcodeGen project spec
Signing.xcconfig code signing (ad-hoc unless Local.xcconfig is present)
Stop Please is intentionally non-invasive:
- nothing is injected into other apps
- no security settings are changed
- target apps are used as installed, with no plugins or settings
- the override is set only for your commands, never when the menu opens or sources are listed (plus once when the helper starts, to release one left behind)
- the helper refuses to send a command unless the intended app really became the Now Playing app
If the helper exits, Stop Please restarts it at once, and a new helper releases any override left behind.
If media keys or headphone buttons ever seem stuck on one app, quit and reopen Stop Please.
- The override is system-wide. While a command is routed through it, any media key press or command from another app also reaches the targeted app. The window is a fraction of each command's roughly 30 ms, but not zero. The open-source project this technique comes from left out per-app commands for this reason.
- Platform risk. The route depends on the Apple-identity exemption and on Perl shipping with macOS. Apple has said scripting runtimes will eventually be removed, and any macOS update could close the route. When it stops working, the menu says so.
- Only apps that appear in Now Playing. Apps that play audio without publishing to Now Playing are not seen.
- One source per app. A browser is one source regardless of how many tabs play.
- Apps with the same identity. Some apps are signed with a generic identity; for example, several Electron apps can all appear as
Electron. When two of them play at once, Stop Please refuses to control them rather than risk the wrong one. - A relaunched app is not resumed. Groups remember the app's process, so an app that quit after being paused is skipped.
- Groups are not saved across quits.
Open an issue and say what happened; a sentence or two is enough. If you can, attach a log: right after the problem, open Settings… from the menu, click Export Log…, and drag the saved file into the issue. The log starts with the app and macOS versions and your shortcut settings, then lists what Stop Please did, with app names but never what you were playing. It is plain text, so you can read it first. macOS keeps these entries for hours to a few days, so export soon after the problem.
- mediaremote-adapter by ungive, for the technique of reaching MediaRemote from the system Perl. Stop Please's helper is its own implementation, including the per-app commands.
- AltTab and Mac Mouse Fix, for handling the Accessibility permission: noticing a revoke before it can freeze the mouse, and when macOS will ask.
- LaunchAtLogin-Modern, for launch at login that respects System Settings.
- LinearMouse, for exporting recent entries from the system log.
- AeroSpace, for signing releases with a self-signed certificate so the permission survives updates.