Pawse

A fast, native music player for your local library, built in Rust and GPUI, with a buttery-smooth, customizable 120+ fps interface, exclusive (bit-perfect) output, and a rich feature set.

macOS · Windows · Linux

Download · Build from source

Remote control — desktop & mobile

• Bit-perfect playback — sample-rate / bit-depth matching with a live bit-perfect status indicator, plus an untouched signal path on every platform: exclusive output on Windows and macOS, and native sample rate on Linux.
• Modern, fluid, customizable UI — a clean, easy-to-use interface that stays smooth at 120+ fps, and strips down to your taste: hide the controls, labels and columns you never use, element by element.
• Themes & languages — 20+ built-in themes and 20 UI languages, with an option for any theme to follow the cover art.
• Wide format support — FLAC, ALAC, MP3, WAV, OGG, DSD (DSF/DFF, decoded to PCM), and more.
• CUE sheets — single-file albums are split into individual tracks automatically.
• Instant fuzzy search — find any album, artist or track as you type.
• Tag editor (beta) — edit tags in your files, per track or album.
• Lyrics — time-synced lyrics from your files or fetched online.
• Remote control — control playback from any device on your network through a built-in HTTP web view.
• System media integration — control playback from your OS media controls and hardware media keys.
• Scrobbling — Last.fm, Libre.fm, ListenBrainz (including a custom server) and a local CSV log, all at once, each enabled and configured on its own. Import loved tracks from a service into Liked, or optionally sync your likes back to it.
• Discord — show what you're listening to as your Discord status.
• The little things — click-free fades on pause and seek, artist grouping by album artist (with per-track fallback), keyboard shortcuts, a blurred cover backdrop, and queue de-duplication — small comforts that add up to a player you actually want to live in.

Apple Silicon (M1 and newer) — arm64-dmg

Open the dmg and move Pawse.app to Applications. Builds are unsigned, so macOS blocks the first launch — clear it either way:

• Launch Pawse, then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the message about Pawse near the bottom and click Open Anyway.

• Or drop the quarantine flag from a terminal and launch normally:

  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Pawse.app

After that it opens like any other app, and updates install themselves.

Unsigned here too: in the SmartScreen dialog click More info → Run anyway. The portable zip never updates itself, so grab a new one when a release lands.

chmod +x the AppImage and launch it — it checks for new releases and updates itself. The .deb and pacman files are plain one-off packages, not a repository, so grab a new one when a release lands.

Prefer something your system manages?

Flatpak — signed and sandboxed, updated together with everything else. No self-update inside the app; it arrives with flatpak update.

flatpak install --user https://popovpsk.github.io/pawse/pawse.flatpakref
flatpak run io.github.popovpsk.pawse

AM catalog — am -i pawse, or appman -i pawse without root.

Requires a stable Rust toolchain (edition 2024).

cargo run --release

macOS — GPUI needs the Metal toolchain:

xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

Linux — install build dependencies first:

sudo apt-get install -y libasound2-dev libfontconfig-dev libwayland-dev \
  libxkbcommon-x11-dev build-essential cmake clang

Licensed under the MIT License.