My music setup was a pinned browser tab for years. It worked, technically. It also ate RAM doing nothing, my media keys only worked when that tab happened to be focused, and I killed the music at least once a week by closing the wrong window. There’s no official YouTube Music desktop app on Linux, and most of what exists is the same web player in an Electron shell.
So I built my own. It’s called Limusic. Rust and Tauri, no bundled Chromium, audio goes through libmpv.
You sign in with your actual YouTube Music account, so your playlists, likes and subscriptions are just there, and liking a song or adding it to a playlist syncs back like you’d expect.
The part I actually care about is that it’s not bare bones:
- Proper MPRIS, so media keys and your now playing widget just work
- System tray, closing the window doesn’t kill the song, plus play/pause and skip from the tray
- Discord Rich Presence with album art and a live progress bar
- Last.fm scrobbling, connect once and forget about it
- Synced lyrics in a side panel, click a line to jump there
- Listen Together, synced rooms so you and a friend hear the same thing at the same time
- 8 themes, including Catppuccin, because obviously
- Gapless playback, volume normalization, shuffle, repeat, autoplay radio
- Your queue survives a restart
Free and open source, GPL. AppImage (self updating) or an rpm for Fedora, which is what I daily drive. No Flatpak or AUR yet, both are on the list. There’s a Windows build too, and no macOS one yet.
Would really love for people to try it, and I’d genuinely like to hear what everyone thinks. ❤️
Site: https://simohypers.github.io/limusic/ Downloads: https://github.com/SimoHypers/limusic/releases/latest
Not affiliated with Google or YouTube, just a thing I made because I wanted it
Go ahead and sign in with your YouTube Gmail credentials, he or she won’t automatically store them for future use.
The source code is open and on Github, and there is also a guide to compiling and running the code locally, if not trusted. I can see that being a paint point though.
But the option of listening to music without signing-in is available. 👍
Ah that’s good. I never sign up to the radio. So basically I don’t wish to login to listen to music.
This is my singular concern. I know it’s open source but I am not knowledgeable nor ambitious enough to scour the code looking for malicious intent. So I would be wondering what assurances we have against this.
Same as my previous answer, the code can be compiled after installing the necessary dependencies and ran locally without the need of trusting my releases. But as a bonus, music can be played and enjoyed without signing in. 👍
I should honestly add this to your OP, it will definitely give you more test pilots. :)
You cannot have it both ways. The source code is open for the sake of transparency. You can’t complain about not trusting the author when the code is readily available. Nothing wrong with laziness, but it’s not that you couldn’t check if you were really that concerned.