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
YouTube, Spotify and other services have a great advantage over locally stored mp3: a strong recommendation system and a virtually infinite library.
It would be good to have a recommendation system which does not depend on these systems, but the difficult part is to get the data to build it.
I reckon the metadata scraped by Anna's archive may be used to build something like that, but that will eventually become outdated.
I'm kind of over the recommendation system infinite library phase of my music listening. With 10,000+ songs in my library, I'm happy enough to hear an "old favorite" a couple of times a year, and by the time all those old favorites have played, 6+ months has gone by, so...
Acousticbrainz / Essentia can be the basis for that, or at least good enough for me to sort out the Metallica from the Enya and play the right mood at the right time from my collection of eclectica.