Musike: A Free Open Source Music Player for YouTube Music, With No Ads and No Account

Musike is a personal music player for YouTube's catalog: any song or music video, as audio or video, with no ads, no account, and no subscription. It started from the idea behind the old Discord music bots, a server that fetches audio straight from YouTube and hands it over ready to play, except here the interface is a full music player instead of a chat: fast, simple, and built to feel like a modern app. It runs as a Windows, macOS, and Linux app, as an Android, Android TV, and iPhone app that needs no computer, in any browser as an installable PWA, and in Docker. It is free and open source under the MIT license, written in TypeScript, and it has 461 stars on GitHub. The promise is in the tagline, your music, uninterrupted, and the whole design follows from it: nothing between you and the song, no ad break, no login wall, no monthly charge.

Musike searches YouTube Music with separate tabs for songs, videos, and albums, with suggestions as you type, and you can paste a YouTube link to play it right away. The Genres button opens YouTube Music's genres, rock, pop, hip-hop, indie, metal, jazz, and more, and each genre shows its bands and artists or all its songs in one list. Artist pages show greatest hits plus every album and single, and album pages play in the original order, shuffle, or save as a playlist in one click. One of the best features is Search a list: type several songs separated by commas, and Musike finds each one, picks the best match, which you can swap, and lets you play, favorite, or send them all to a playlist at once. The queue supports play next, shuffle, and repeat, and when the queue ends, autoplay radio keeps going with similar songs. Seeking is instant through HTTP Range streaming, and the next track is preloaded, so playback feels like a native app rather than a web page wrapping a video.

The feature that sells Musike is the switch between song and official music video at the same point in the track. You can start a song as audio, tap Video, and the official music video picks up exactly where the audio left off, and switch back the same way. Musike finds the official video automatically, and it only accepts videos from the artist's own channel, so it never plays a cover or a wrong version by mistake. Video mode lives in the side panel, goes full screen on phones, or floats as a mini player, and cinema mode maximizes the video with controls that fade while you watch. Video plays in SD for a fast start or HD 720p from a local cache. On phones, audio keeps playing with the screen off, with controls in the notification, on the lock screen, and on headphones, and it pauses for calls and when headphones are unplugged. Video mode is not on Android and iPhone yet, which is the one real gap, and it is on the roadmap.

Playlists, favorites, and recently played history live in a local file on your own machine, not on somebody's server. You can select many tracks at once to play, favorite, or add to a playlist, and the whole library exports to a single backup file that any Musike instance can read: web, desktop, Android, Docker, or another computer entirely. Importing shows a preview of how many playlists, tracks, and favorites are inside, and you choose to merge with your library, which adds what is missing and never deletes, or replace everything. If you are moving between two setups and want to know what actually differs before you import, a JSON Compare shows the difference between two backup files, so you can decide whether to merge or replace with your eyes open. The backup is readable, versioned JSON, and the server validates every track on import, skipping invalid entries instead of rejecting the whole file. There is no cloud sync yet, and the backup file is the project's honest answer to that for now.

Musike covers more screens than most commercial players. The desktop app is a native Electron window on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a Windows installer, macOS builds for Apple Silicon and Intel, and Linux .deb and AppImage packages, and updating keeps your library because it is backed up automatically before each update. The Android app is standalone: no computer and no server, just an internet connection, and the same APK switches to a remote-friendly interface on Android TV. The iPhone app installs with AltStore, SideStore, or Sideloadly, since Apple only allows App Store apps to install directly, and with a free Apple ID it needs re-signing every 7 days, which those tools do in the background. A Docker image runs on amd64 and arm64, including a Raspberry Pi, for a home server or NAS, and the web app is an installable PWA you can open from any browser. The interface is customizable throughout: dark and light themes, any accent color, a compact icons-only sidebar, English and Brazilian Portuguese, and a layout you can rearrange panel by panel.

Musike is a project for personal and educational use, and the project says so plainly in its own legal notice. Playing YouTube content without ads by extracting its streams goes against YouTube's Terms of Service, and public services that did this, such as the Groovy and Rythm bots, were shut down after notices from Google. The project asks users not to offer Musike as a public service, not to monetize it, and to respect the artists' rights, and it hosts, distributes, and stores no YouTube content beyond the temporary local cache of whoever runs it. That is the deal with this tool: it is free, open source, and genuinely good at what it does, and it sits in a gray area that YouTube has enforced against public services before. Use it for yourself, keep it off a public server, and understand the trade-off you are making.

Install from the latest release on GitHub: a Windows setup exe, a macOS dmg, a Linux .deb or AppImage, an Android APK, or an iOS ipa. The Windows installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows shows a warning you dismiss with More info and Run anyway, and the macOS app is not notarized yet, so the first launch needs Open Anyway in Privacy and Security. On first launch the app downloads yt-dlp, Deno, and FFmpeg, about 140 MB together, and keeps them up to date from Settings. If songs stop playing, the first fix is to update yt-dlp from Settings, because YouTube changes often and yt-dlp keeps up. If YouTube asks the connection to prove it is not a bot, that usually means a VPN or a shared network: turn the VPN off and try again, and an IP Check will tell you what address YouTube is seeing. If songs keep buffering, a Speed Test will tell you whether the connection itself is the problem. And run it at home, not on a VPS: YouTube blocks datacenter IPs, while a home server uses your residential IP.