YT Music

A native YouTube Music client for macOS.
Built with Tauri v2 + Rust. No Electron. No bloat.

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Why

YouTube Music deserves a proper desktop app — not a browser tab eating 300MB of RAM.

YT Music wraps the official web player in a native macOS window using the system WebKit engine (the same one Safari and Apple Music use). The result: ~30MB RAM, instant startup, and native OS integration.

Features

Feature	Description
Native performance	System WebKit — no bundled Chromium, no Electron overhead
Ad blocking	Blocks ad requests at the network level + removes ad DOM elements
Now Playing	Integrates with macOS media controls (Control Center, AirPods, Touch Bar)
Titlebar overlay	Frameless window with native traffic lights — feels like a first-party app
Tiny footprint	~8MB app bundle, ~30MB RAM at runtime
Privacy	No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking beyond what YouTube Music itself does

Performance

Metric	YT Music (this)	Electron-based alternatives
App bundle	~8 MB	150+ MB
RAM (idle)	~30 MB	200–400 MB
Startup	< 1s	3–5s
CPU (idle)	~0%	1–3%

Install

Download

Grab the latest .dmg from Releases.

Build from source

Requires Rust and Bun.

git clone https://github.com/codeatlasdev/yt-music-client.git
cd yt-music-client
bun install
bun run build

The built app will be in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.

Development

bun run dev

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  macOS Window (native, titlebar overlay)     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  WKWebView                                   │
│  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│  │  music.youtube.com                      │ │
│  │  + injected CSS (titlebar padding)      │ │
│  │  + injected JS (ad removal, media info) │ │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Rust Backend (Tauri)                        │
│  ├── Ad blocking (URL interception)          │
│  ├── Media controls (souvlaki → Now Playing) │
│  └── User agent spoof (Chrome UA)            │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Tech Stack

• Runtime: Tauri v2 — Rust backend + system WebView
• Language: Rust (backend), JavaScript (injected scripts)
• Media: souvlaki — cross-platform media controls
• Build: Bun + Cargo
• Target: macOS 13+ (Ventura and later)

Roadmap

• Core playback (YouTube Music web)
• Ad blocking (network + DOM)
• macOS Now Playing integration
• Native titlebar overlay
• Keyboard media keys (play/pause/next/prev)
• Picture-in-Picture mini player
• Discord Rich Presence
• Global search shortcut
• Custom themes
• Linux & Windows support

Contributing

PRs welcome. Keep it lean — this project values performance over features.

# Fork, clone, then:
bun install
bun run dev
# Make changes, test, submit PR

License

MIT

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Made by codeatlas