I've recently upgraded my laptop (after the 6 years my previous MacBookPro latest) and I've now got one of these touchbar things. It's cute, but I know that my laptop will be closed for 90% of the time and attach to an external monitor and keyboard.

Spotify should hire you, not sure what you changed on the Muse app but this thing is amazing wow. I can see the album art and if I like a song. I JUST CLICK THE HEART AND IT TURNS RED. So simple yet it's amazing. Not sure why the Spotify version on the touch bar doesn't do this. Or maybe the ability to completely control iTunes or Spotify from the Touch Bar without pulling up the app. Or perhaps the bar could catch notifications instead of having them take up a corner of. By default, you can control your music with your Mac’s Touch Bar only if you use iTunes. Players like Spotify and Vox aren’t supported as of this writing. And even iTunes doesn’t offer that much functionality on the Touch Bar. But we’ve got a fix for that.

That said, it absolutely does my head in that the control strip's 'play/pause' button will only control iTunes/Music. So I fixed that.

Karabiner Elements to the rescue

I've been using Karabiner Elements for a while now and it's a superb bit of software. It gives you complete control over the keyboard and sits in between and gives you the ability to completely change what the operating system actually sees.

So it stands to reason that I could capture the play/pause key press and completely take it over and send it to Spotify instead. It's not quite that simple, but it's no too far off.

Step one is to download and install Karabiner Elements. Once you've got that running, it needs to see the touch bar - which apparently announces itself as an entirely separate keyboard. So check this box:

Now Karabiner can see your keyboard - and a quick way to test this is to head to 'Simple Modifications' and add 'play_or_pause' and map it to (something like) 'mute'. Now test the play control strip button - if it mutes, then it's working and the next step is to create a 'complex modification' to control Spotify (you should remove the simple modification now).

Spotify Touch Bar Download

Controlling Spotify

From Karabiner Elements' preferences, on the Misc tab, click on the button the reads 'Open config folder'. This is where we'll add the following in new JSON file. Under the directory complex_modifications (make it if it doesn't exist), add this file as touchbar.json (or as you please):

This says: when the button pressed is play_or_pause then run an applescript and prevent the keyup. You can determine the key value from the Karabiner ElementsViewer that's also installed.

The Apple Script

Spotify Touch Bar Settings

The last bit of the puzzle, you need to store this file in the same directory as the touchbar.json file (or change the location in the shell_command value).

And that…should be it. I now have control over my own machine, which is frankly how it should always be.

Spotify Icon Touch Bar

Honourable mention to Better Touch Tool which looks like it might do the job, but I'm already familiar with Karabiner and Karabiner definitely does the job!