A native desktop YouTube Music client. Rust + Tauri, ad-free, no Electron.
Limusic talks directly to YouTube's internal API and plays audio through libmpv: no bundled
browser runtime, no backend server, no ads in the audio. It started as a desktop rebuild of the
playback engine behind Metrolist, an Android
YouTube Music client, and grew from there.
Features
Ad-free playback: streams come straight from YouTube's API, ads never do
Search & browse: songs, albums, artists, playlists and the YTM home feed, with results previewing as you type
Sign in with your YouTube Music account: in-app Google login or cookie-paste, several accounts at once with switching between them
Your library: playlists, liked songs, saved albums and artists, your uploads, and write actions (like, add to playlist, create/edit/delete playlists including cover art, subscribe, save to library)
History: everything you have played, in YouTube Music's own day buckets
Gapless playback with loudness normalization, powered by libmpv
Tempo, pitch and reverb: adjust playback speed and pitch, add reverb with independent dry/wet controls, and save custom presets on this device.
Queue with radio/automix continuation, drag to reorder, restored across restarts
Synced lyrics: side panel with auto-scroll and click-to-jump, word by word where the source has the timings, with translations under each line
Music videos: optional, the video plays where the artwork sits, with the same gapless audio behind it
Mini Player and theater mode: shrink to a strip that keeps playing, or go fullscreen with cover and lyrics side by side
Local Music: play your own files, with all metadata still intact
Last.fm scrobbling: connect once from the title bar, every play is scrobbled
ListenBrainz scrobbling: paste a user token in the Scrobbling settings, same plays go there too
Discord Rich Presence: artwork, live progress bar, one click to toggle
OS media keys and now-playing integration (MPRIS on Linux, SMTC on Windows, plus playback buttons on the Windows taskbar preview)
System tray: close the window, keep the music; play/pause and skip from the tray, optional start-on-login
Listen Together: synced listening rooms over a small self-hosted relay
Keyboard and mouse: Ctrl+K searches from anywhere, Ctrl+H lists every shortcut, right-click menus throughout, Ctrl and the wheel zooms the interface
Eighteen languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with more in progress on Weblate
Self-updating builds (AppImage on Linux, setup.exe on Windows, .app on macOS)
Make it yours: accent palettes, custom colors, your own fonts, corner roundness, a custom app icon, and an adaptive theme that recolors the app from the playing cover
sudo zypper ar -p 100 https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/itachi_re/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:itachi_re.repo then sudo zypper install limusic. Maintained by @itachi-re, updates through zypper. The repo carries the maintainer's other packages too, so -p 100 keeps it below the distro repos
Scrobbling & Discord
Last.fm lives in the title bar, next to the window controls, and ListenBrainz connects from
Settings ▸ Scrobbling. Both get the same cleaned-up track (the tab's preview shows what each
play counts as).
Last.fm: click the Last.fm mark, approve Limusic in the browser tab that
opens, and you're connected for good. Tracks scrobble at the halfway point (or
four minutes, whichever comes first), which is Last.fm's own rule. Click again
to see the account or disconnect.
ListenBrainz: open the Scrobbling settings, paste the user token from
listenbrainz.org/settings and connect.
Plays submit as playing_now on start and one single listen at the same
halfway-or-four-minutes point. A new MetaBrainz account has to verify its email first, or
ListenBrainz turns every listen away (the Scrobbling tab says so).
Discord: click the Discord mark to toggle Rich Presence. Green dot means
it's live. The card shows the track, artist, album art, and a progress bar, and
it disappears when you pause.
Building from source? Last.fm needs your own API credentials, and they are not in
the repo. Get a key at last.fm/api/account/create
and put it in src-tauri/lastfm.keys:
Without that file everything else still builds and runs; the Last.fm button just
reports that it isn't configured.
Lyrics
Open the panel with the microphone button in the player bar, next to the queue
button. It takes the same side of the window as the queue, so opening one closes
the other.
Lyrics come from Boidu first, then
LRCLIB, then YouTube Music's own timed lyrics, then
Netease, QQ Music and Kugou, falling back to plain un-timed text when nobody has
a synced version. Matching is keyed on the track's exact length, because popular
songs exist as several cuts and the wrong one drifts a few seconds out. Results
are cached locally, so replaying a track is instant.
Boidu is the only source with per-word timings, which is what lets a line
highlight word by word as it's sung. It goes first for that reason, which also
means it is asked about every track you play. Turn it off in Settings ->
Playback -> Word-by-word lyrics and the other sources still provide
line-by-line lyrics. Netease additionally supplies translations, shown under
each line where it has them.
Note that YouTube Music's lyrics are licensed per region and are missing
entirely in some countries. Where that's the case, LRCLIB does all the work.
Listen Together
Synced listening with friends. Everyone streams their own audio from YouTube;
the room only relays play/pause, seeks, track changes and the queue. One person
hosts the relay:
cargo run -p sync-server # plain WebSocket on 0.0.0.0:8080
Front it with something that terminates TLS (Tailscale Funnel, Cloudflare
Tunnel), then paste the wss:// URL into the Listen Together panel in the app.
Rooms have join codes and the host approves every join and every track
suggestion.
Translations
Limusic is translated on Weblate,
who host it free for libre projects.
English, Spanish, French, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese and Indonesian ship in
the app today.
The badge above shows everything else in flight.
Translate on Weblate, not in a pull request. Weblate keeps its own copy of
the catalogs, so a hand-edited fr.json merged here puts the two out of sync
and the next batch of real translations arrives as a merge conflict. Weblate
also shows you the English original beside each string, flags translations that
went stale when the English changed, checks that placeholders like {count}
survived, and opens the pull request for you. Anything untranslated falls back
to English in the app, so partial work is safe to submit.
en.json is the exception: it changes by hand, in whichever pull request
changes the UI. Switching a finished language on in the picker takes a small
code change too, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Building from Source
Fedora:
sudo dnf install mpv-libs mpv-libs-devel webkit2gtk4.1-devel \
gcc gcc-c++ make openssl-devel librsvg2-devel
cd ui && pnpm install && cd ..
cargo tauri build
A pure Rust crate speaks YouTube's InnerTube API, impersonating several
official client identities and falling back between them when one fails.
YouTube's stream URLs are protected by obfuscated JavaScript (the signature
cipher and the n parameter) and by BotGuard attestation. Limusic runs that
JavaScript where it expects to run, in a real webview, hidden, and never lets
any of it touch the UI process.
Audio goes through libmpv: gapless transitions, an on-disk cache, and
loudness normalization from YouTube's own metadata.
The UI is a SvelteKit SPA that only ever talks to the Rust core. It never
contacts YouTube itself.
Star History
Support
Limusic is free and stays free. If it earned a coffee,
ko-fi.com/simohypers is where to leave one.
Disclaimer
This project is not affiliated with, funded, authorized, endorsed by, or in
any way associated with YouTube, Google LLC, or any of their affiliates and
subsidiaries.
All trademarks, service marks, and intellectual property rights referenced in
this project belong to their respective owners.
What is this?A native desktop client for YouTube Music, built with Rust and Tauri. It plays music ad-free, without Electron and without a backend server of its own.
Does it download the songs or just stream them?It streams audio straight from YouTube's internal API rather than offering a download feature. Playback goes through libmpv, which keeps an on-disk cache.
How do I get it running?Download the installer for your system from the releases: setup.exe on Windows, the AppImage on Linux, or the .dmg on Apple Silicon Macs. Arch, Fedora and openSUSE users can also install community-maintained packages.
Do I need a YouTube account or my own API keys?Signing in with your YouTube Music account gives you your library, history and write actions like liking songs. Building Last.fm support from source requires your own Last.fm API key.
Any catches I should know before installing?The AppImage needs glibc 2.39 or newer. The .deb and .rpm packages do not self-update, so you have to redownload each release.
Does it have synced word-by-word lyrics?Yes, where the source has timings: Boidu gives per-word timings and is tried first, then LRCLIB, YouTube Music, Netease, QQ Music and Kugou. Netease also supplies translations under each line.
Can I change the speed, pitch or add reverb?Yes: tempo and pitch can be adjusted, reverb has independent dry and wet controls, and custom presets can be saved on the device.
Can it play my own local music files?Yes, the Local Music feature plays your own files with their metadata still intact.
Why did the author build it?It began as a desktop rebuild of the playback engine behind Metrolist, an Android YouTube Music client, and grew from there.
A native desktop client for YouTube Music, built with Rust and Tauri. It plays music ad-free, without Electron and without a backend server of its own.