FAQ

Because the connection it was streaming over did not survive the sleep, and most players do not check. They come back, find a stream object that still reports itself as playing, and leave you with a Playing label and no sound. Deep Happy treats waking as a moment to verify rather than assume: if the stream it had is no longer sound, it builds a new one instead of resuming a dead one. Closing and reopening the lid is one of the three situations the app was written for.

A VPN reconnecting replaces the network path underneath a stream that is already open. Some players tear the stream down the moment the path changes, and some never notice it broke. Deep Happy does neither: a path change is not on its own a reason to interrupt anything that is still producing sound, and what decides is whether audio is still arriving, not what the system announced. If the stream really has died, it is rebuilt, and the status line says so while that happens.

No, and it doesn't claim to. Recovery always means building a new connection — a wedged stream is never nudged or resumed in the hope it comes back — so you may hear a short gap while the new one comes up. What the app promises is narrower and more useful: it comes back on its own, and it never shows you Playing over silence.

Any stream. Add station… opens two fields — a name of your choosing and a full http:// or https:// stream address — and the station joins your list. If the address is not one the app can use it says so under the fields and keeps what you typed. Stations can be renamed and removed from their own rows, and the list is stored per machine, like the other preferences.

Use Find a station…, under Add station… in the station list. Type a name or a genre, press Return, and Deep Happy searches an open station directory and lists what it finds — each result showing a trimmed name over a line of what is known about that stream, such as the format, the bitrate and the country. Click a result to add it to your list. Typing an address by hand still works exactly as before; the directory is a second way in, not a replacement.

Because most directory stations publish their track titles over a metadata channel the app does not yet read. When no title arrives, the title line keeps showing the station's own name and the track-lookup buttons stay dim, since there is nothing to search for. The station plays normally; it just doesn't say what it is playing. This is a known gap, not a setting you can change.

Yes — that is the second thing the app is for. Deep Happy on one Mac can drive Deep Happy on another: play, stop, the volume, and what is actually playing over there. Turn Allow remote control on in Settings on the Mac with the speakers — it is off by default and the listener does not exist until you do — then pair the two with a four-digit PIN that is good for two minutes and three tries. macOS will ask for Local Network permission the first time, and remote control cannot find the other Mac without it. A Mac that plays accepts at most three paired controllers at once.

The two Macs talk to each other directly, on your own network — there is no Heaven8 server in the middle relaying anything, so this is not a way to control a Mac across the internet. A full-tunnel VPN is the awkward case: it routes every connection off the local network, service discovery included, so the other Mac never appears in the picker. Type its name or address into the Address field in the pairing form instead, and pairing and every session afterwards work the same over it.

Because it is the system volume, deliberately — the same dial as your volume keys, Control Centre and every other app on the machine that is making the sound. Turning the radio down turns everything else down with it, and a slider at zero silences the whole machine. Move the volume any other way and the slider follows. The button beside it is that machine's mute, which is separate: muting leaves the volume where it was, so unmuting puts the sound back at exactly the level you left it. Deep Happy never restores a machine's volume on its own.

A cold start has to fetch the stream before there is anything to play, which takes the few seconds any internet radio takes. Two things shorten it. For about fifteen seconds after you press Stop the app keeps the stream it was playing, so Play picks it straight back up instantly; leave it stopped longer and it connects afresh. And if you have turned Play on launch off, the app still gets the stream ready silently while it starts, so a first Play within the next two minutes takes about half a second instead of the nine or so a cold connection needs. That warm-up costs the same bandwidth as playing, which is why it is held for two minutes and then dropped.

Yes. Your keyboard's play/pause and stop keys drive it as they do any other player, and Control Centre shows the current track — including through a reconnect, so the keys keep controlling Deep Happy rather than wandering off to another app. One exception: if you have turned Play on launch off, the hardware play key may open Apple Music until you have pressed Play once in that launch, because macOS routes that key to whichever app most recently made sound.

Both, at your choice. By default there is no Dock icon and the menu-bar item is the whole app: click it and the player opens as a popup. Switch Show Dock icon on in Settings and clicking the icon opens a real window holding the same player, laid out side by side with the artwork at full size. It is the same player either way, so the two can never say different things, and turning the Dock icon back off is always safe.

There is no account and nothing to sign into. Over the network the app talks to the stream you chose; to an open station directory, radio-browser.info, when you search it; and — only if you turn remote control on — to another Mac you paired with on your own network. There are no analytics, no telemetry, no ads and no third-party SDKs, and the app has no third-party dependencies at all. The privacy policy has the detail.

It requires macOS 26 or later and runs inside Apple's App Sandbox. It is not on the Mac App Store yet — the app builds and runs today, ahead of a first submission — so there is no download link on this site, and anything elsewhere claiming to be Deep Happy is not ours.