My music setup was a pinned browser tab for years. It worked, technically. It also ate RAM doing nothing, my media keys only worked when that tab happened to be focused, and I killed the music at least once a week by closing the wrong window. There's no official YouTube Music desktop app on Linux, and most of what exists is the same web player in an Electron shell.
So I built my own. It's called Limusic. Rust and Tauri, no bundled Chromium, audio goes through libmpv.
You sign in with your actual YouTube Music account, so your playlists, likes and subscriptions are just there, and liking a song or adding it to a playlist syncs back like you'd expect.
The part I actually care about is that it's not bare bones:
- Proper MPRIS, so media keys and your now playing widget just work
- System tray, closing the window doesn't kill the song, plus play/pause and skip from the tray
- Discord Rich Presence with album art and a live progress bar
- Last.fm scrobbling, connect once and forget about it
- Synced lyrics in a side panel, click a line to jump there
- Listen Together, synced rooms so you and a friend hear the same thing at the same time
- 8 themes, including Catppuccin, because obviously
- Gapless playback, volume normalization, shuffle, repeat, autoplay radio
- Your queue survives a restart
Free and open source, GPL. AppImage (self updating) or an rpm for Fedora, which is what I daily drive. No Flatpak or AUR yet, both are on the list. There's a Windows build too, and no macOS one yet.
Would really love for people to try it, and I'd genuinely like to hear what everyone thinks. ❤️
Site: https://simohypers.github.io/limusic/ Downloads: https://github.com/SimoHypers/limusic/releases/latest
Not affiliated with Google or YouTube, just a thing I made because I wanted it
Fair points, I concede.
As someone who has built a lot of software it's hard to see people treat LLMs as useless when they are shooting themselves in the foot by doing so.
There will be an interesting time, a few years out. When all venture capital for AI has dried up and AI tokens are 10x as expensive.
All of the passion projects by non-developers who can't maintain them will dry up.
AI, in the state it exists is a really interesting experiment on what would people make if coding were easily accessible to all. But projects like that, that are against Youtube TOS, which will require massive upkeep will go fallow the first time they make it more difficult to access the data.
A more useful project would be to make a framework to play local files, do lookups though discogs, stuff that won't change much long term, then modularize the youtube connector so when it fails, the project not useless out of the gate.
This is also screaming bloody murder for a Google cease-and-desist.
Useless? No. Look at the Linux kernel, nothing is written by "AI" but adjacent llm tools are used. It depends entirely on what and how.
If something is vibe coded it can fuck all the way off. If they use a llm to point a human at possible issues (and the human knows what they're doing) then the worst that happens is the human wastes some time chasing a nonexistent bug.
Ngl I was doing that for a while, google search is ass these days, even 4 years ago, ai was more useful for finding sources than google. I was using bingai at the time and I would also google and try to find sources the regular way, I had way more success just telling ai to only return edu sources (or similar instructions, idr exactly since it's been a while) People that seek easy results with no effort could've got them through chegg back before ai really took off. It was always an active choice to learn how to do a problem rather than just grabbing an answer and faking the proof. (Ngl mostly because exams are proctored or in person, but that hasn't changed even with AI, students will still fail to passs their classes and get degrees if they rely purely on AI)