Perch
A small hub that lives in your MacBook's notch
Music with visualizers and synced lyrics, system stats, calendar reminders, the menu bar icons the notch hides, and quick alerts, all around the camera.
brew install --cask trieuluan/perch/perch
Perch analyzes what your Mac is playing, on-device, and follows 24 frequency bands, the lead melody, drum hits and how bright the sound is. It shows up behind the player (7 styles), next to the album art in the closed notch, and across the menu bar (11 styles), in colors from the album art or your own gradient.
The line being sung shows under the closed notch, and long lines glide sideways so you can read them to the end. Open the notch and swipe the player with two fingers to see the whole song, karaoke style: click a line to jump there, or nudge the timing when a music video runs early. Lyrics come from LRCLIB, with Vietnamese titles and YouTube-style names handled.
Short messages when something happens: an event is about to start, a reminder is due, the Mac is overloaded (and which app is responsible), headphones connect (with battery), the keyboard input source changes, or Caps Lock turns on.
A few minutes before a meeting, the open notch shows a pill with the time left. Click it to join Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles or FaceTime, in the native app when it's installed.
The System tab shows CPU, memory, network and battery with live sparklines.
On a crowded menu bar, macOS hides icons behind the notch. The Menu Bar tab lists them, with their real icons, and opens their menus.
Switch between speakers, AirPods and other outputs from a button in the player.
Perch also keeps everything from Boring Notch: the music player, calendar, file shelf, system HUDs, battery and webcam mirror. It's available in English and Vietnamese, following your Mac's language.
Pulled straight from GitHub whenever a new version ships.
Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later (visualizers need 14.2+). After the first launch, Perch updates itself.
brew install --cask trieuluan/perch/perch
The cask clears the quarantine flag for you, so Perch opens straight away.
Prefer the Terminal? This does the same thing:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Perch.app
Yes. Perch is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license, and the full source code is on GitHub.
Perch isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS can't verify the developer and blocks a downloaded copy until you allow it once in System Settings › Privacy & Security. Installing with Homebrew skips this step. Developer ID signing and notarization are on the roadmap.
No. The visualizers need the System Audio Recording permission, but the sound is analyzed on your Mac and is never recorded or sent anywhere. If you don't grant it, the visualizers fall back to a simple animation.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later. The audio visualizers need macOS 14.2 or later.
After the first launch, Perch checks for new versions and updates itself.
Perch is a fork of Boring Notch and keeps everything it has: the music player, calendar, file shelf, system HUDs, battery and webcam mirror. On top of that it adds visualizers that follow the music, synced lyrics, notch alerts, one-click meeting join, the System and Menu Bar tabs, an audio output picker, and a Vietnamese translation.
Please open an issue on GitHub, with your macOS version and what you were doing when it happened.