Lyrenne: a YouTube Music Player for Windows and Linux
A free, open source YouTube Music desktop player for Windows 10 and 11, and Linux.
Your real library, your real playlists, synced lyrics and offline downloads. No ads, no
telemetry. On Windows you unzip it and it runs; on Linux it is one .deb or .rpm.
Download ·
Website ·
Features · Troubleshooting · Build from source
Install
Windows
- Grab
Lyrenne-X.Y.Z-portable.zip from the latest release.
- Extract it anywhere except a cloud-synced folder (see the warning below).
- Run
Lyrenne.exe. A short setup walks you through signing in and picking your settings.
When it opens a browser to sign in, choose Accept all on the cookie prompt. That is how Lyrenne
signs in: it reads those cookies once, then closes the browser profile. If the browser offers to
save your password afterwards you can decline, that part makes no difference.
Or install it with Scoop:
scoop bucket add lyrenne https://github.com/Doctordefector/scoop-lyrenne
scoop install lyrenne
There is nothing else to install. VLC and ffmpeg ship inside the archive, and the app carries its
own Java runtime. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
[!WARNING]
Do not extract into OneDrive, Dropbox, or a synced Desktop/Documents folder. Lyrenne is
portable by design: the database, your login, and your downloads all live next to
Lyrenne.exe. A sync client that reopens those files mid-write will corrupt the database or
lock it on startup. C:\Lyrenne is a good home; the Desktop usually is not.
Linux
Every release ships a .deb (Debian, Ubuntu and their derivatives) and an .rpm (Fedora),
64-bit. Grab the one for your distro from the latest release:
sudo apt install ./lyrenne_*_amd64.deb
sudo dnf install ./lyrenne-*.x86_64.rpm
The package installs to /opt/lyrenne, adds a lyrenne command and a menu entry, and pulls in
VLC from your distro (VLC is not bundled on Linux; the Snap and Flatpak versions of VLC can't be
used). Updates are one click from Settings → Updates: Lyrenne downloads the signed package and
installs it through your system's password prompt.
- Your library and settings live in
~/.local/share/lyrenne, downloads in ~/Music/Lyrenne.
- Sign-in uses Firefox if you have it (Snap Firefox included), otherwise Chrome/Chromium/Edge/Brave/
Vivaldi. With none of those, or only Flatpak browsers, use Advanced: paste a cookie on the
sign-in screen.
- Media keys, the GNOME/KDE media widget and
playerctl work through MPRIS, and song changes
show as desktop notifications. There is no tray icon on Linux, so closing the window quits.
- Car/USB export needs
ffmpeg from your package manager.
Features
| |
|---|
| Playback | Streaming and local files through a bundled VLC engine, gapless queue, shuffle and repeat, Smart Shuffle that mixes songs like your playlist into it, crossfade, playback speed 0.25×–3×, sleep timer, 10-band equalizer with presets, skip silence, volume normalization, mouse wheel on any slider |
| Library | Full two-way sync with YouTube Music: liked songs, albums, artists and playlists, and every edit you make locally is pushed back to your account. Local playlists, auto playlists, sorting, search across the library or within one playlist, and grid/list views |
| Discovery | Home feed with continuations, Explore (new releases, moods & genres, charts), search with filters and suggestions, Start Radio, autoplay that keeps similar songs coming when your queue runs out, quick picks, podcasts |
| Lyrics | Synced and plain, from a five-provider chain (BetterLyrics → LrcLib → KuGou → YouTube lyrics → YouTube transcript), word-by-word highlighting where the provider has word timing, manual search when the automatic match is wrong, and size, alignment and click-to-seek options |
| Social | Listen Together rooms with live playback sync, Discord Rich Presence, Last.fm scrobbling |
| Accounts | Keep several YouTube accounts signed in and switch between them with one click, handy on a shared PC |
| Extras | Guided first-run setup, floating always-on-top mini player, music recognition through Shazam, listening stats and history, offline downloads with progress, played from disk wherever they are queued, car/USB export to loudness-normalized MP3, backup and restore, proxy support, region and language settings, system tray with a mini player, Windows Now Playing and media controls, media-key and keyboard shortcuts, Material 3 theming that follows your system |
Everything the app writes (database, credentials, preferences, cache, downloads) stays in the
app's own folder, and there is no telemetry. One setting is the single exception: "Name Lyrenne in
Windows media controls" adds a Start Menu shortcut, which is what lets Windows label the Now Playing
card as Lyrenne rather than "Unknown app". It is on by default, and turning it off deletes the
shortcut.
Traffic goes to YouTube, plus whichever of these you actually turn on: the lyrics providers, Last.fm
if you connect it, Discord's local pipe for Rich Presence, GitHub for update checks, and the Listen
Together relay server while you are in a room. Listen Together is the only one that involves a
third-party server holding anything, and it only sees what you are playing while a room is open.
Why it exists
YouTube ships no desktop app for YouTube Music, and a browser tab is not a music player.
Lyrenne is not a wrapper around the website and not a repackaged mobile app. It is a native
Compose Desktop (JVM) application that talks to the same InnerTube API the mobile clients use,
with its own VLC playback engine, local database and sync layer written for the desktop.
- First released 9 March 2026, actively developed, 80+ releases since.
- Auto-updater built in: it checks GitHub, downloads the new portable ZIP and restarts itself.
- Everything runs locally. No account of its own, no analytics, no server in the middle.
Forks are welcome; it is GPL-3.0 and that is the point.
Troubleshooting
The window never appears. Lyrenne writes lyrenne.log next to Lyrenne.exe on every launch,
and a failure to start reports itself in a dialog. Send that log with a
bug report. The most common cause is a
cloud-synced install folder, so move it out of OneDrive and try again.
"VLC not found". The bundled copy lives in app/resources/vlc. If your unzip tool skipped it
(some do, on long paths), extract again with 7-Zip or Windows Explorer, or install VLC 3.x 64-bit
and Lyrenne will use that instead.
Car / USB export does nothing. That feature shells out to app/resources/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe.
If your antivirus quarantined it, restore it or drop any ffmpeg.exe next to Lyrenne.exe.
Everything looks empty after signing in. An expired YouTube session returns empty results
rather than an error. Sign out and sign in again from Settings.
Upgrading from 2.9.3 or older? 2.9.4 renamed the data files, so it starts with an empty
library. To keep yours, close the app and, inside its data/ folder, rename metrolist.db
to lyrenne.db. Preferences and your login carry over on their own.
Build from source
git clone https://github.com/Doctordefector/Lyrenne.git
cd Lyrenne
./gradlew :desktop:createDistributable
Needs JDK 21. The build downloads ffmpeg once (~114 MB) into desktop/resources/windows-x64/;
VLC is already in the tree. The runnable app lands in
desktop/build/compose/binaries/main/app/Lyrenne/, and ./gradlew :desktop:packagePortableZip
produces the release archive.
./gradlew :desktop:run starts it straight from the source tree.
Credits
Built and maintained by Andrei Chapliuk.
Lyrenne began as a desktop port of Metrolist by
mostafaalagamy and the Metrolist Group, and still uses their GPL-3.0 licensed InnerTube, LrcLib,
KuGou, BetterLyrics and ShazamKit modules. Lyrenne is an independent project and is not affiliated
with, endorsed by, or associated with the Metrolist Group.
Also built on vlcj,
Compose Multiplatform,
SQLDelight and
NewPipe Extractor, with Windows media-session
support from mediasession-kt.
License
GPL-3.0. See LICENSE. Lyrenne is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, or Alphabet.
