YouTube Music

Electron wrapper around YouTube Music featuring:

Native look & feel, aims at keeping the original interface
Framework for custom plugins: change YouTube Music to your needs (style, content, features), enable/disable plugins in one click

Download

You can check out the latest release to quickly find the latest version.

Arch Linux

Install the youtube-music-bin package from the AUR. For AUR installation instructions, take a look at this wiki page.

MacOS

If you get an error "is damaged and can’t be opened." when launching the app, run xattr -cr /Applications/YouTube\ Music.app in Terminal.

Windows

You can use the Scoop package manager to install the youtube-music package from the extras bucket.

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install extras/youtube-music

Alternately you can use Winget, Windows 11s official CLI package manager to install the th-ch.YouTubeMusic package.

Note: Microsoft Defender SmartScreen might block the installation since it is from an "unknown publisher". This is also true for the manual installation when trying to run the executable(.exe) after a manual download here on github (same file).

winget install th-ch.YouTubeMusic

Available plugins:

Ad Blocker: Block all ads and tracking out of the box
Audio Compressor: Apply compression to audio (lowers the volume of the loudest parts of the signal and raises the volume of the softest parts)
Blur Nav Bar: makes navigation bar transparent and blurry
Bypass age restrictions: bypass YouTube's age verification
Captions selector: Enable captions
Disable Autoplay: Makes every song start in "paused" mode
Discord: Show your friends what you listen to with Rich Presence
Downloader: downloads MP3 directly from the interface (youtube-dl)
Exponential Volume: Makes the volume slider exponential so it's easier to select lower volumes.
In-App Menu: gives bars a fancy, dark look

(see this post if you have problem accessing the menu after enabling this plugin and hide-menu option)
Last.fm: Scrobbles support
Lyrics Genius: Adds lyrics support for most songs
Navigation: Next/Back navigation arrows directly integrated in the interface, like in your favorite browser
No Google Login: Remove Google login buttons and links from the interface
Notifications: Display a notification when a song starts playing (interactive notifications are available on windows)
Picture in picture: allows to switch the app to picture-in-picture mode
Playback Speed: Listen fast, listen slow! Adds a slider that controls song speed
Precise Volume: Control the volume precisely using mousewheel/hotkeys, with a custom hud and customizable volume steps
Quality Changer: Allows changing the video quality with a button on the video overlay
Shortcuts: Allows setting global hotkeys for playback (play/pause/next/previous) + disable media osd by overriding media keys + enable Ctrl/CMD + F to search + enable linux mpris support for mediakeys + custom hotkeys for advanced users
Skip-Silences - Automatically skip silenced sections
SponsorBlock: Automatically Skips non-music parts like intro/outro or parts of music videos where the song isn't playing
Taskbar Media Control: Control playback from your Windows taskbar
Touchbar: Custom TouchBar layout for macOS
Tuna-OBS: Integration with OBS's plugin Tuna
Video Toggle: Adds a button to switch between Video/Song mode. can also optionally remove the whole video tab
Visualizer: Different music visualizers

Auto confirm when paused (Always Enabled): disable the "Continue Watching?" popup that pause music after a certain time

If using Hide Menu option - you can show the menu with the alt key (or escape if using the in-app-menu plugin)

Themes

You can load CSS files to change the look of the application (Options > Visual Tweaks > Themes).

Some predefined themes are available in https://github.com/kerichdev/themes-for-ytmdesktop-player.

Dev

git clone https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
cd youtube-music
yarn
yarn start

Build your own plugins

Using plugins, you can:

manipulate the app - the BrowserWindow from electron is passed to the plugin handler
change the front by manipulating the HTML/CSS

Creating a plugin

Create a folder in plugins/YOUR-PLUGIN-NAME:

if you need to manipulate the BrowserWindow, create a file back.js with the following template:

module.exports = win => {
	// win is the BrowserWindow object
};

if you need to change the front, create a file front.js with the following template:

module.exports = () => {
	// This function will be called as a preload script
	// So you can use front features like `document.querySelector`
};

Common use cases

injecting custom CSS: create a style.css file in the same folder then:

const path = require("path");
const { injectCSS } = require("../utils");

// back.js
module.exports = win => {
	injectCSS(win.webContents, path.join(__dirname, "style.css"));
};

changing the HTML:

// front.js
module.exports = () => {
	// Remove the login button
	document.querySelector(".sign-in-link.ytmusic-nav-bar").remove();
};

communicating between the front and back: can be done using the ipcMain module from electron. See utils.js file and example in navigation plugin.

Build

Clone the repo
Run yarn to install dependencies
Run yarn build:OS
- yarn build:win - Windows
- yarn build:linux - Linux
- yarn build:mac - MacOS

Builds the app for macOS, Linux, and Windows, using electron-builder.

Tests

yarn test

Uses Playwright to test the app.

JDJelectronics/youtube-music-Hack