Lyrenne for iPad
A personal, sideloaded iPad port of Lyrenne, the
YouTube Music desktop player. SwiftUI + AVPlayer, built with xtool.
Ported from Lyrenne 81ac0ac (2026-10-25).
Made by Andrei (Doctordefector) with love <3
What it does
- Home: YouTube Music's feed (your own when signed in): Quick picks, mixes, new releases
- Search songs, videos, albums, artists or playlists, with YouTube's suggestions while typing and
your recent searches. Tap a song to play it and everything below it
- Artist pages (top songs, albums, singles, related artists) and album pages; tap the artist
under Now Playing, or long-press a song for Go to artist / Go to album
- Library tab: sign in with Google, then your Liked songs and playlists (Play, Shuffle, Download all)
- Downloads (top of Library, signed in or not): songs kept for offline listening; downloaded songs always play from disk. They
are also in the Files app under On My iPad > Lyrenne as
Artist - Title [id].m4a (the id is
how the app finds them; deleting one there removes the download)
- Autoplay: the queue tops itself up with YouTube Music's radio for the playing song
- Queue (the list button beside the heart, under the song): jump to, swipe to remove. Long-press any song: Play next, Add to queue, Download
- Shuffle what's left of the queue; repeat all or repeat one
- Synced lyrics from lrclib (tap a line to seek), plain lyrics when that's all there is
- Lyrics tools above the lyrics: move a song's lyrics earlier or later (timer), show how
Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Cyrillic and other scripts read under each line (on by default), and
edit or write a song's lyrics (LRC or plain). All three are kept per song, as on desktop
- Keeps playing in the background and with the screen locked; lock screen / Control Center controls with artwork
- Listen Together (guest): join a room started in desktop or Android Lyrenne with its code; the
host's songs, play/pause and seeks follow here. Hosting from the iPad is not built
- iPad only, split view: browsing on the left, now playing and lyrics on the right, over the
blurred cover. Gold accent and app icon from desktop
Left out on purpose: Discord, Last.fm, hosting a Listen Together room, equalizer, crossfade.
Layout
| Path | What |
|---|
Sources/LyrenneCore/ | Foundation only, no UI, builds on Linux too. InnerTube.swift (search, radio, stream URLs), Browse.swift (home, artist pages, search filters, suggestions), Account.swift (signed-in calls, session refresh), Downloads.swift (fetching audio, offline files), Lyrics.swift (lrclib), Romanize.swift (romanized lyrics: the system's Japanese tokenizer and transliteration, Korean by hand), ListenTogether.swift (guest client, hand-rolled protobuf for desktop's listentogether.proto) |
Sources/Lyrenne/ | The iPad app: Player.swift (queue, AVPlayer, lock screen), Library.swift (sign-in, Keychain, library, playlists), LyricsTweaks.swift (per-song lyrics timing and edits, in UserDefaults), DownloadsView.swift, TogetherView.swift (Listen Together room), Browse.swift (home, shelves, artist page), LyrenneApp.swift (layout, search, now playing, lyrics) |
Sources/lyrenne-check/ | Live end-to-end check of the core: search, radio, lyrics, per-client stream report, download, 500-song playlist paging; with LYRENNE_COOKIE set, the library too |
Info.plist | Merged by xtool: iPad-only family, background audio |
Resources/AppIcon.png | App icon, desktop's lyre (icon-small.svg) full-bleed at 1024 px |
.github/workflows/ipa.yml | Builds the unsigned .ipa, and runs the app on an iPad simulator with screenshots |
Sign-in
Google's sign-in page in a web view, the same flow as upstream Android. The resulting cookie is
kept in the Keychain. Google rotates session cookies and a stored copy dies within weeks unless the
rotated ones are folded back, so every launch loads music.youtube.com with it, reads LOGGED_IN, and
merges the new cookies (desktop's AuthManager.refreshSession). An expired session says so and asks
you to sign in again; being offline keeps the login.
Streams (October 2026)
- Most clients now hand out URLs that serve only the first MiB without a PO token (which needs
BotGuard, not available here). Desktop's VISIONOS client still gets whole-file URLs, so it is
tried first, with
visitorData sent like desktop. The check before using a URL probes the file's
last byte; desktop's first-byte check passes the truncated URLs.
- googlevideo also refuses (403) a plain GET, open-ended Ranges and any Range over 1 MiB. AVPlayer
streams with open-ended Ranges, so the app fetches each song in 1 MiB ranges, in parallel (~0.3 s
for a 6 MB song), and plays the file. Downloads use the same fetch.
- Web clients need YouTube's JS signature deobfuscation (NewPipe), which has no iOS port.
When playback breaks: run swift run lyrenne-check and read its client ... lines, then compare
streamClients in InnerTube.swift with desktop's YouTubeClient.kt / ContentAwareFallbackStrategy.kt.
The app's error under the player also lists each client's reason.
Listen Together
Same server (wss://metroserverx.meowery.eu/ws) and messages as desktop's listentogether/.
The iPad only joins: it sends join_room, follows sync_playback / sync_state, and sends
buffer_ready once the host's song has loaded so the host can start everyone together.
lyrenne-check decodes a sample message and, on macOS, joins a made-up room and expects the
server's "Room not found" (Linux Foundation has no WebSockets, so that part is skipped there).
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
