refrytFeatures
refryt does what the YouTube Music website does, in a window that starts fast, stays small and fits the desktop it runs on. Likes, playlists and history are saved to your YouTube account, so they show up on the website and the mobile apps too.
Built light
refryt is written in Rust. It talks to YouTube through the same internal API the website uses, asks YouTube's player endpoint for streams directly, and falls back to yt-dlp for the few songs it won't hand over. An idle refryt does nothing in the background: no timers, no polling.
Listening
- Up next, in two parts. Next up holds what you queued with Play next or Add to queue; Autoplay holds the radio YouTube adds after it. Clear your part with one click and the radio stays.
- Radio filters. Steer Autoplay with the filters YouTube Music offers: Familiar, Discover, and often a decade or a genre.
- Synced lyrics. Timed lines from LRCLIB, or YouTube's plain lyrics, in a side panel or beside the cover in the fullscreen player.
- Music videos in the app, up to 720p.
- Sound settings. High (Opus, about 160 kbps), Medium or Low quality, YouTube's own loudness normalisation, and autoplay when the queue runs out.
- Search songs, albums or artists, each asked from YouTube directly, with your search history.
Your library
- Playlists you can create, rename and reorder by dragging, with YouTube's suggestions on your own.
- Liked songs marked everywhere, and a tile on each artist page with the ones you liked.
- Home your way. Choose which of Home's sections come first, and the order your playlists sit in the sidebar.
- Explore, charts, moods and new releases, as on the website, plus your listening history.
- Album pages tinted with a colour taken from the cover.
- Brand accounts switch from the account menu.
Local and offline
Local folders
Add folders in Settings and browse them under Library, Local, like a file tree. Any folder plays as a playlist.
Downloads
With YouTube Premium, download songs, albums and playlists to ~/Music/refryt with tags and cover art.
Offline mode
When the connection drops, refryt points you to what you downloaded. Downloaded songs still play.
Look and feel
- 23 themes: Classic, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, Dracula, Rosé Pine, Everforest and Solarized, light and dark, plus Spotify.
- Themes are CSS files. Three colours make a theme; refryt derives the rest. Write your own.
- Transparency and background blur on KDE Plasma (Wayland), niri, GNOME 51 and newer, Windows and macOS.
- Round, soft or sharp corners, card outlines, and scroll fades for see-through windows.
- Resizable sidebars. The left one folds down to an icon rail.
On your desktop
Media keys and controls
Media keys and the system's media controls: MPRIS on Linux, the Now Playing widget on macOS and the media overlay on Windows.
Tray and startup
Close to the tray instead of quitting, and launch on login if you want it there.
Discord Rich Presence
Optional and off by default. Shows what you're playing to people who can see your profile.
Updates itself
The installer, MSI and AppImage update with one click. Flatpak, Homebrew and Scoop get the right command.
Keyboard first
Space, arrows, F for fullscreen, Ctrl+K for search. Every shortcut.
Clicks like Spotify
One click selects a song and two play it. A setting makes one click play.
Signing in
- In the app, through Google in a small window of its own.
- From your browser. Import the session from Firefox and its forks, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Opera, Whale or Helium.
- Signed out, refryt still searches and plays.
- No telemetry. The session stays on your computer with owner-only permissions. Privacy.