Songtide: a native YouTube Music app for Mac

Songtide is a free, open-source YouTube Music desktop app for macOS, built with SwiftUI. It adds an equalizer, a visualizer, synced lyrics, a menu bar mini player and a widget to YouTube Music, and is signed and notarized by Apple.

Download: songtide.dcoded.dev · or brew install --cask dcoded-dev/tap/songtide

Songtide is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google or YouTube.

What it adds to YouTube Music

• A Mac sidebar, toolbar, menus and player bar in place of the website's own
• A 10-band equalizer that applies only to Songtide's playback
• A visualizer (MilkDrop presets, through Butterchurn), with synced lyrics over it
• Synced lyrics in a floating window, from LRCLIB
• A menu bar mini player, a desktop widget and a Control Center control
• Media keys and Now Playing, track notifications, an audio output picker and a sleep timer
• Shortcuts and Siri actions, AppleScript, and songtide:// links
• Last.fm scrobbling and Discord status (both optional and off by default)
• Automatic updates

Requires macOS 15 or later. You sign in with your own Google account inside the app; what you can play depends on your YouTube Music account.

Visualizer	Equalizer

Links and scripting

Songtide opens its own links, so launchers and scripts can start music:

songtide://play?v=VIDEO_ID
songtide://playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID
songtide://search?q=daft+punk

File › Open Copied Link plays a YouTube or YouTube Music link from the clipboard, and Controls › Copy Song Link and Share Song… give you the link to what's playing.

AppleScript (for Raycast, Alfred and the like):

tell application "Songtide"
    playpause
    next track
    open link "https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
    search "daft punk"
    get {track name, track artist, track link, playing}
    set sound volume to 40
    set player position to 60
end tell

Commands: playpause, play, pause, next track, previous track, like, open link, search. Properties: playing, track name, track artist, track album, track link, track duration, player position, sound volume.

How it works

The YouTube Music website runs in a WKWebView with its own navigation and player hidden. The sidebar, toolbar, player bar, menus, mini player and Settings are SwiftUI and AppKit, and talk to the page through Songtide/Web/bridge.js. The equalizer and visualizer capture the app's own audio with a Core Audio process tap.

Build

Requires a recent Xcode and XcodeGen.

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -scheme Songtide -derivedDataPath build build
open build/Build/Products/Debug/Songtide.app

project.yml signs with DCODED's team; set DEVELOPMENT_TEAM to your own to build.

Last.fm needs an API key. Without one the app builds and runs, and Last.fm is unavailable. To enable it, copy Config/Secrets.example.xcconfig to Config/Secrets.xcconfig and fill it in.

Debugging

Debug builds log bridge traffic to stderr when run with YTM_DEBUG=1, and scripts/ytm-eval '<js>' evaluates JavaScript in the running app's page.

Repository layout

• Songtide/ the app
• SongtideWidget/ the widget and Control Center control
• Shared/ code used by both
• site/ the website at songtide.dcoded.dev, including release notes and the update feed
• worker/ the site's Cloudflare Worker, which keeps anonymous daily counts of downloads and update checks (described in the privacy policy)
• scripts/ release and debugging scripts

Privacy

The app has no analytics or tracking. See the privacy policy for the details, including the anonymous counts above.

License

GPL-3.0. Songtide was developed privately from September 2026 and open-sourced at version 1.1.20.

Butterchurn and its presets, in Songtide/Web/Visualizer and site/vendor, are under their own licenses.