Sleeve

Your Mac wallpaper, always the album you're playing.

Sleeve is a tiny macOS menu bar app that watches Apple Music and sets your desktop wallpaper to the cover of the current album — composited the way the Music app does it: the sharp square cover floating over a color-matched, blurred background.

Features

• High-res artwork — pulls the cover up to 3000×3000 from the iTunes API, with the artwork embedded in Music as a fallback (local files / offline).
• Background styles — Blur, Frosted Glass, Bokeh, Zoom, Crystal, Mosaic.
• Texture overlays (combine with any style) — Grain, Noise, Pixelate.
• Cover size and effect amount controls.
• Keeps the last cover up when music is paused.
• Launch at Login toggle.
• Everything is GPU Core Image; settings apply live within a couple of seconds.
• Native, ~200 KB, no dependencies, no telemetry. The only network call is the public iTunes artwork lookup.

Install

Build from source (recommended)

No Gatekeeper warnings — a locally built app isn't quarantined.

# one-time, if you don't have the compiler:
xcode-select --install

git clone https://github.com/jnptzl/sleeve.git
cd sleeve
./build.sh
open "/Applications/Sleeve.app"

Prebuilt download

Grab Sleeve.app.zip from the latest release. It's an unsigned build (no paid Apple Developer account), so macOS quarantines it — clear the flag once:

# after unzipping and moving Sleeve.app to /Applications:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Sleeve.app"
open "/Applications/Sleeve.app"

On first launch, approve the one-time prompt to control Music — that's how Sleeve reads the current track. It changes nothing in Music; it only reads what's playing.

Usage

Click the menu bar icon (a record on a sleeve):

• Album Art Wallpaper — on/off (off restores your previous wallpaper)
• Cover Size · Background Style · Texture · Effect Amount
• Launch at Login

How it works

Apple Music (AppleScript)  →  current artist / album
        │
        ▼
iTunes Search API  →  3000×3000 cover   (fallback: artwork embedded in Music)
        │
        ▼
Core Image  →  aspect-fill + blur/style + texture + sharp centered cover + shadow
        │
        ▼
NSWorkspace.setDesktopImageURL  →  every display

It's a single Swift file (app.swift): Music reading, fetch, compositor, menu, and the watch loop. icon.swift generates the app icon; build.sh compiles, ad-hoc signs, and installs to /Applications.

Requirements

macOS 13+, the Apple Music app, and Xcode Command Line Tools to build.

Contributing

PRs welcome. To change the app's identity for your own fork, edit NAME / BUNDLE_ID at the top of build.sh.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later © 0xjean