YouTube Music, as an actual Mac app — with the player turned up.

Install · What this fork adds · Which one should you use? · Building it

YouTube Music in a browser tab is fine right up until you want it to behave like an app — media keys that actually work, a Now Playing card in Control Center, a window that doesn't vanish into thirty other tabs. YTubic is a desktop client that talks to YouTube's API directly and draws its own interface instead of wrapping the website, so pages open instantly and playback starts without the spinner.

This is a fork of YTubic by @NUber-dev — their app, their work. It started as the macOS port back when upstream was Windows-only; upstream now ships official macOS builds of its own, so what's left here is a set of player features that haven't landed upstream: a fullscreen player, video playback with a quality picker, and a chunk of lyrics work. Same GPL-3.0 license.

Probably upstream's. It's the maintained one, its Mac build is Universal so it runs on Intel Macs too, it updates itself, and it gets fixes first. It also has Windows and Linux builds.

Use this fork if you specifically want the extras below and don't mind that it lags upstream and can't auto-update.

About two minutes, and most of that is macOS being suspicious of you.

1. Download the .dmg and open it.

2. Drag YTubic onto the Applications folder.

3. Open it. macOS will refuse, saying "Apple could not verify YTubic is free of malware" — that happens to every app not signed with Apple's $99-a-year certificate, which this one isn't. Open Terminal and paste:

xattr -cr /Applications/YTubic.app

That clears the "downloaded from the internet" flag and nothing else. Open the app again and it launches normally, this time and every time after.

4. Sign in with your Google account. If that account has YouTube Premium you get no ads; without it, you get them.

This build is Apple Silicon only (M1 or newer — upstream's is Universal if you're on Intel). The first song stalls for a few seconds while the app fetches a small streaming helper in the background; everything after that is quick.

On top of everything upstream already does:

• A fullscreen player — Apple Music style, with an ambient backdrop that crossfades between tracks and the notch band blended into the artwork
• Video mode — watch the video version of a track at 1080p, 1440p or 4K, through a quality picker that only offers the tiers a given video actually has
• Lyrics that pick the right record — matched on identity rather than the closest guess, padded intros auto-aligned, and manual timing nudges that stick to the track instead of resetting
• Accent colour from the cover — the seek bar, play button and active toggles take their colour from the album art instead of staying brand red
• Search history — recent queries saved and offered on the empty search page

• Instant navigation — pages prefetched and cached, no reloads, no spinners
• A player that moves — dock it along the bottom or as a right-hand panel, or pop it out into a small always-on-top window
• Synced lyrics — line by line, from LRCLIB and Musixmatch
• Cover art at full size — upgraded to the high-resolution studio version
• Your whole library — playlists, likes, albums, artists, search with filters, radio queues, and playlist suggestions
• Mac media controls — media keys, Now Playing in Control Center and on the lock screen, playback state kept in sync both ways

This is an unofficial client. It isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google or YouTube; "YouTube" and "YouTube Music" are trademarks of Google LLC. Audio streams through yt-dlp and can break whenever YouTube changes its internals. Use at your own risk.

Needs Node 20+, Rust, and pnpm.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev            # run it
pnpm tauri build --bundles app,dmg   # build a .dmg

The build lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. One gotcha worth knowing: Tauri's output .app is only linker-signed, which macOS reads as tampering on another machine — sign it before you hand it to anyone, otherwise they get "YTubic is damaged" with no way past it:

codesign --force --deep --sign - YTubic.app

pnpm test         # vitest unit tests (pure parsers/matchers)
pnpm lint         # eslint
pnpm format       # prettier --write
pnpm build        # tsc + vite production build

src/
├── routes/              # TanStack Router file-based routes
├── components/
│   ├── ui/              # shadcn primitives
│   ├── layout/          # AppShell, sidebar, topbar, player bar, floating player, lyrics
│   └── shared/          # Track list/rows, cards, shelves, context menus
├── lib/
│   ├── innertube/       # Raw InnerTube client + parsers
│   ├── lyrics/          # LRCLIB / Musixmatch sources + LRC parser
│   ├── store/           # Zustand stores
│   ├── audio-engine.ts  # Playback engine
│   └── stream.ts        # Stream URL resolver (localhost proxy)
└── hooks/
src-tauri/               # Rust backend (axum stream proxy, cookies, media session)

YTubic by @NUber-dev — the app this is built on. Everything except the fork extras listed above is theirs.

yt-dlp for audio streaming, LRCLIB and Musixmatch for synced lyrics, and Tauri, shadcn/ui and TanStack for the stack underneath.

GPL-3.0 — free to use, modify and redistribute; derivative works stay open source under the same license. This fork keeps the original copyright and license intact.