Limusic

Limusic is an unofficial desktop client for YouTube Music, written in Rust with a Tauri shell instead of Electron — so there's no bundled Chromium and the memory footprint stays small. It talks directly to YouTube's internal API and plays audio through libmpv. There's no backend server and no ads: ads live in YouTube's player UI, which Limusic never loads.

Sign in with your YouTube Music account (in-app Google login, or paste your cookies) and you get your actual library — playlists, liked songs, the home feed — plus write actions: like a track, add it to a playlist, create or rename playlists, subscribe to artists. Playback is gapless with loudness normalization, the queue continues with YouTube's radio/automix when it runs out, and it's restored across restarts. A lyrics panel shows line-by-line synced lyrics from LRCLIB, falling back to YouTube Music's own timed lyrics.

It also covers the things a desktop music app is expected to do: OS media keys and now-playing integration (MPRIS on Linux, SMTC on Windows), a system tray so closing the window doesn't stop the music, Last.fm scrobbling, and Discord Rich Presence with album art and a live progress bar. Listen Together lets you listen in sync with friends over a small self-hosted relay — everyone streams their own audio, the room only syncs play/pause, seeks, and the queue.

Limusic is free and open source (GPL-3.0), currently shipping self-updating builds for Linux (AppImage, plus an .rpm) and Windows; macOS builds from source. It is not affiliated with Google — it works by speaking YouTube's private API directly, which means a YouTube-side change can occasionally break playback until an update lands.