ytm-rs

YouTube Music in a fast, native desktop app.

Built in Rust with egui and rodio. No Electron, no browser-based player, and under 100 MB of memory while playing.

Website · Download · Features · Installation · Build from source

• Features
• Screenshots
• Installation
• Usage
• Building from source
• Notes
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgements

Listening

• Your music feed: Listen again, Quick picks, your mixes (My Supermix, Discover Mix and more) and mood filters, refreshed each time you open a page.
• Explore and search: new releases, charts, and search across songs, albums, artists and playlists.
• Your library: liked songs, saved albums and playlists, history and uploads. Upload your own songs from the Uploads tab or by dropping files on the window.
• Playback: queue, song radio, shuffle, repeat and autoplay, with the next track prefetched for instant skips. 256 kbps audio with YouTube Premium, volume normalization, and a choice of output device.
• Skip non-music parts: jumps over talking, skits and sponsor breaks in music videos, as marked by SponsorBlock.
• Downloads: save any song as a tagged .m4a with cover art, at the best quality your account gets, and play it offline.

Lyrics and looks

• Karaoke lyrics: word-by-word lyrics drawn the way the Better Lyrics extension draws them, from every Better Lyrics source, with automatic fallback, romanization, translations and per-song timing offsets.
• Animated background: the album art drifts and pulses with the music behind everything. Go full-screen, or hide the lyrics to see just the artwork.
• 27 themes: 26 rebuilt from the Better Lyrics community themes, such as Apple Music, Spicy, Spinning Record and reCover, plus Fluent, in the style of Windows 11 with your Windows accent colour. Each one restyles the whole app. Use any bundled or installed font.

Together and across services

• Listen together: start a jam, share the code or link, and up to 16 people hear the same song at the same moment. The host decides whether guests can add songs or control playback.
• Transfer from Spotify: bring playlists and Liked Songs over to YouTube Music in the background. ytm-rs asks you when it isn't sure about a match and picks up where it left off if interrupted.
• Last.fm and Discord: scrobbling and Rich Presence.

Desktop

• System media controls, taskbar thumbnail buttons, close to tray, a collapsible sidebar and screen-reader-accessible controls. On Windows, the app draws its own title bar so the window is one surface.
• Automatic updates in the background for both the installed and portable versions, with release notes when an update is ready.

Home	Artist page
Spinning Record theme	reCover theme
Search	Theme gallery
Listen together	Transfer from Spotify

Downloads for every platform are on the latest release. Once installed, ytm-rs keeps itself up to date; you can turn this off in Settings → Updates.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ytm-rs.app

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grapedjuice/ytm-rs/main/linux/install.sh | sh

You need the Rust toolchain.

git clone https://github.com/grapedjuice/ytm-rs.git
cd ytm-rs

cargo build --release

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev libasound2-dev libgtk-3-dev \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libxdo-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev libdbus-1-dev
cargo build --release

cargo build --release
sh macos/bundle.sh target/release/ytm-rs "$(grep -m1 '^version' Cargo.toml | cut -d'"' -f2)" target/release

The relay in server/ is a separate Cloudflare Worker, also in Rust (workers-rs). You don't need it to build or run the app, which connects to the hosted relay. To run it locally, start npx wrangler dev --local in server/ and launch the app with YTM_JAM_SERVER=ws://127.0.0.1:8787.

• The interface and audio playback are native. Google and Spotify sign-in and lyrics verification open temporary system webview windows (WebView2 on Windows).
• Lyrics come from the providers Better Lyrics uses (Better Lyrics, Unison, Musixmatch, LRCLib and others), so availability depends on the track. Translations come from the lyrics when included, otherwise from Unison or Google Translate; machine translations and romanization can be rough.
• The first song after launch can take about 5 seconds to start while the app prepares YouTube's player. After that, songs start instantly.
• Premium-only and age-restricted songs play through your signed-in account. With YouTube Premium they play natively; without it, age-restricted songs fall back to yt-dlp, which needs Node.js.
• No audio goes through the Listen together relay. It only passes along what's playing and where; every listener streams the song from YouTube Music themselves.
• Themes are native translations of CSS themes, so some details differ from the originals. Fonts that can't be redistributed (SF Pro, Spotify's) are replaced with the closest open fonts.
• ytm-rs is an unofficial client. Changes to YouTube Music or third-party services can affect playback, sign-in or lyrics.

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue. Pull requests are welcome.

ytm-rs is licensed under GPL-3.0.

• egui for the interface, rodio and Symphonia for audio.
• Browsing, search and your library come straight from YouTube Music's own web API, the one music.youtube.com uses.
• Signed-in stream URLs are decoded with yt-dlp's EJS solver running in QuickJS.
• Listen together runs on a small relay built with workers-rs on Cloudflare Durable Objects.
• The animated background is based on Kawarp from Better Lyrics, and the theme presets are adapted from the Better Lyrics theme store, with credit to each theme's creators.
• Fonts: Inter, DM Sans, Google Sans Flex, Figtree and Instrument Sans (SIL OFL 1.1). Icons: Lucide.