@dutton Yeah, I mean the whole thing is just so janky (apologies, @JoeJun I really appreciate your feedback a few months ago here, but computers have been reliably playing back music including DRM protected streams with excellent reliability since the 1990s so I'm really not sure how it can possibly be so hard to send some JSON API calls to and from a server and somehow have that whole thing fall in a heap) but your suggestion, astonishingly, did allow playback to begin. _________________ (sorry about <--- those but this forum doesn't respect paragraph breaks in comments (!) and that's the best I could do) My application gets no information back from queries during playback so it has no idea what the media duration was, or where the playhead is; it does at least get the playback state but that's about it. Worse, the Music app in macOS acted as if it was playing the track itself! So, not just a "now playing" application, but bizarrely a totally different application started reacting with notifications, history entries and even playback progress. So while my app using the official API from Apple was unable to get playback position, somehow a totally unrelated application had access. _________________ I don't understand why there isn't a native macOS API for this; there are only iOS examples out there, none of the docs talk about macOS, nobody's written a 3rd party client... So all we've got is Catalyst as far as I can see and I don't understand why it's still such a mess. I just don't understand why the API still says things like "failed to prepare to play" on any platform after so many years. There are so many aspects of this that just make no sense. How is this possible? It's just music playback! I've written head-ends for VOD systems myself that did this and more with full server-side trick play over protocols like RTSP and it really just was not hard - and that was well over a decade ago. Meanwhile other music services like Spotify just work. _________________ I'm just so bemused, depressed and fed up by this. The developer experience on all platforms is just awful. _________________ Is there any update? Is there any hope? Has there been progress in the last 3 months on making at least a Catalyst option for music playback work? _________________ I'm not intending to shoot the messenger here, but Apple is one of the richest companies on earth and has essentially unbounded engineering resource. I just can't figure out how this situation can have arose. Is there actually just no corporate interest at all in making this work? Does Apple simply not care about any 3rd party developers for their music service? Sigh. Sorry. But this whole thing is just so incredibly sad :-(

Thanks @apple82 - yes, it seems to be working again now.

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