In Tahoe, how do I move the play controls in Music?

Found it. Per tidbits.com (link below), you can disable Liquid Glass on a per-app basis. Stop the Music app, open the Terminal app and enter the command

defaults write com.apple.Music com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

then restart the Music app. This will revert the two most noxious changes to the app in my eyes: returns the controls to their rightful place at the top of the window, and restores the status bar at the bottom of the playlist in "View as Songs" mode.

You can revert to the godawful Liquid Glass nonsense by repeating the process and replacing YES with NO, if such a perverse urge should occur to you. More details about the process (and options to implement this system-wide) available at this link (many thanks to TidBits for publishing this):

TidBits article on disabling Liquid Glass

Looks like they've broken this workaround in 26.1. Music app has reverted to the unusable mess that originally shipped with Tahoe, and doesn't seem to be affected by the defaults command any more. Back to "firmly opposed" regarding migrating my daily driver MacBook Air to Tahoe.

I totally agree and have filed a feedback report but looking at my iPad it's obvious that the Music App has been optimised for the mobile iOS26 where the play bar placement needs to stay where it is while the listing can be scrolled beneath.

So once again us iMac users get hung out to dry!

You're welcome. To be fair, that article just dropped yesterday, and it didn't mention the Music app by name. Just had enough details to make me think, "Hmmm, I wonder if this would clean up some of the mess they've made of the Music app."

Since I posted earlier, I've noticed that it fixed another annoying problem. I have my playlists carefully arranged in nested playlist folders, and whenever I selected a song and used the context menu to show that song in a particular playlist, every last playlist folder and subfolder in the sidebar would expand. Since applying this fix it doesn't do that any more.

Finding this has brought me one step closer to migrating to Tahoe on my daily driver MacBook Air. Up to now I've upgraded my Mac mini to Tahoe but this and a couple other quirks have discouraged me from making the switch on my Air. I'll probably still wait until Adobe blesses Photoshop and Lightroom as Tahoe friendly, but I'm no longer firmly opposed to it.

Can you share exactly what you did. I tried entering in the following command into terminal and follow the steps, but after putting in the Code, closing Apple Music and then launching it again, the UI did not appear at all, but then after reverting the code it went back to the standard. Look with the play back controls at the bottom. Would love to change this. Can you share with work for you? Thanks so much.

I closed the Music app first, issued the defaults command exactly as it appeared in my post above, then restarted the Music app and it immediately appeared with the UI looking much like it did in Sequoia.

Well that’s truly sad news and quite honestly a deal breaker for me.

I absolutely will NOT be upgrading to 26.1 on the back of this news.

I’ve been a loyal supporter of Apple for over 40 yrs and have seen them destroy what was once a brilliant app called iTunes and an app that I used daily.

Over recent years and particularly since it morphed into Apple Music the classic version has become an afterthought.

They should have kept the streaming app separate from the personal library player.

I only use an iMac and have never owned an iPhone and still use an iPod Touch 2 for travelling so the optimisation for that platform doesn’t work for me.

After updating to 26.1 this wonderful terminal commant doesn't seem to work anymore ... so unfortunately I've got the godawful UI back again ... Using Pine player now, and it's a shame I don't even want to use my apple music subscription in Tahoe environment. Hope very very very hard someone comes up with another command, or better, that apple wakes up and realises this UI is working very, very bad for lots of music lovers.

I just upgraded from Sequoia to Tahoe 26.1 Upon running the Music app I saw the current playing controls were at the bottom, tried like heck to figure out how to put them back on top of the Music window without success. Decided to search for an answer and ran across this post :-(

I hate hate hate this being at the bottom and that it's also hard to see when it's white against a white-ish background with no apparent border. Why? Why was it changed? Was there a problem? Did they change just for the sake of change with no apparent improvement? Looks that way to me. I regret moving to Tahoe. I use the Music app a lot to play my library of songs and am always in the main Music window. I know people just say you'll get used to it but I don't want to without there being an offsetting benefit and I can't find one. Where is Jobs when you need him????

.. .. and now that I've been using Tahoe a bit, I see they moved controls to the bottom of the screen in many of their apps and moved the Send button in MacOS Mail to the upper right. Ok, these seem like small changes that one should just get used to but I simply fail to see the benefits of their moves. I can get used to the Send button but moving the controls to the bottom of the screen is horrible.

In Mail on my phone, the Search field and other buttons at the bottom of the screen either cover up the dynamic status of fetching mail or they eliminated it so now I open Mail and have to sit there and wait and wait and wait to see if it actually pulls any new mail in because the status is gone and I can't tell what the app is doing.

Changing the user experience in a negative way promotes severe hesitation about making these, supposedly beneficial, updates.

Same same same! In my formatting of my screen full of my commonly used apps, I always had Music on the top center, showing what song I am listening to (and a quick access to get there), as well as the fact that I'm missing a few other Music features I liked better in the old version. LOVED your workaround I found last week-until I decided to update my computer-WHY DID I DO THIS????? I was hoping for some better improvements for the aspects I don't like, and it seems like some were fixed, but some were made worse, like this. Ugh. If anyone figures out a workaround, or how to at least move the music bar up to the top, it would be appreciated!

Until then, looks like I'll be dreading utilizing Music....

You get used to hating it, this is a terrible design change by Apple and something that breaks trust with the company. I don't know why Apple makes such changes, they have done it with Photos etc. Sometimes it's ok to just let good design be. They keep monkeying around thinking it's an improvement but the user (i.e. us) you are just left feeling like you are part of an experiment and temporary solution which is not who or where I want to be.

I have subsequently found that the Mail dynamic activity/status is now at the top left of the screen just below whatever inbox you happen to be in, my last post said Apple eliminated it so I wanted to update my post. I still don't like what they did and want the dynamic status back at the very bottom where it used to be. Why are they messing with things that had no issue??? There is no added functionality, no larger print or icons so why move it???

Apple, pls put things back to where they were in Mail and Music