Radif

A YouTube Music app for the Mac.

yuvrajangadsingh.com/radif · Listed on awesome-mac

Install · What it does · Building it

Radif plays YouTube Music in its own Mac window instead of a browser tab. It talks to YouTube Music's API and draws its own interface rather than wrapping the website, so media keys work and Now Playing shows up in Control Center.

It is Mac only. Songs still in its local cache play without downloading again, audio comes at up to 271 kbps Opus, and the notch can show what's playing.

You need YouTube Music Premium. On a free account it won't play songs. It shows a Premium prompt instead of serving ads.

With Homebrew it's one line, and it installs Deno and skips the Terminal step below:

brew install --cask yuvrajangadsingh/tap/radif

Then sign in with the Google account that has YouTube Music Premium.

Without Homebrew:

1. Download the .dmg and open it.

2. Drag Radif onto the Applications folder.

3. Open it. macOS refuses with "Apple could not verify Radif is free of malware", because the app isn't signed with Apple's $99-a-year certificate. Open Terminal and paste:

xattr -cr /Applications/Radif.app

That clears the app's extended attributes, including the "downloaded from the internet" flag that causes the block. After that it opens normally.

4. Sign in with the Google account that has YouTube Music Premium.

5. For full-quality audio, install Deno (brew install deno). The app finds it on its own. Without it most songs play at about 130 kbps.

The same download runs on Intel and Apple Silicon. It updates itself: a banner in the sidebar offers each new version, one click installs it and another restarts into it. On first launch the app downloads yt-dlp (about 50 MB), so the first song waits for that.

The fullscreen player shows the cover and synced lyrics over a backdrop taken from the artwork, and it crossfades when the track changes. Lyrics come from YouTube Music and LRCLIB. The app checks that a result is for the song that's playing, prefers timed lyrics, and tries to shift the timing when an upload has a padded intro.

Video mode plays the music video for a track, with a quality picker from 360p up to 4K.

On a Mac with a notch, the song title can slide out of it when a track starts, pauses or resumes. It's off by default; turn it on in Settings.

Also: in the side and fullscreen players the seek bar and buttons take their colour from the cover, cover art is upgraded to a high-resolution version when one exists, and recent searches are kept. The player can sit along the bottom, on the right, or in a small window you can pin on top. Playlists, likes, albums, artists, search with filters and radio are all there, and media keys and Now Playing stay in sync with the app both ways.

Radif is an unofficial client. It isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google or YouTube. "YouTube" and "YouTube Music" are trademarks of Google LLC. Audio streams through yt-dlp and can break when YouTube changes its internals. Use at your own risk.

You need Node 20+, Rust and pnpm.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev            # run it
pnpm tauri build --bundles app,dmg   # build a .dmg

The build lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. The develop branch is set to sign with a local dev certificate, so build it with --config '{"bundle":{"macOS":{"signingIdentity":"-"}}}' instead. If you give the app to someone else and their Mac says "Radif is damaged", sign it ad hoc:

codesign --force --deep --sign - Radif.app

pnpm test         # vitest unit tests
pnpm lint         # eslint
pnpm format       # prettier --write
pnpm build        # tsc + vite production build

src/
├── routes/              # TanStack Router file-based routes
├── components/
│   ├── ui/              # shadcn primitives
│   ├── layout/          # AppShell, sidebar, topbar, player bar, floating player, lyrics
│   └── shared/          # Track list/rows, cards, shelves, context menus
├── lib/
│   ├── innertube/       # Raw InnerTube client + parsers
│   ├── lyrics/          # Lyrics sources + LRC parser
│   ├── store/           # Zustand stores
│   ├── audio-engine.ts  # Playback engine
│   └── stream.ts        # Stream URL resolver (localhost proxy)
└── hooks/
src-tauri/               # Rust backend (axum stream proxy, cookies, media session)

Radif started in July 2026 as a fork of YTubic by @NUber-dev, and has been its own project since August. Most of the app is built on their work.

Thanks to yt-dlp for audio streaming, LRCLIB for lyrics, and Tauri, shadcn/ui and TanStack.

The name: a radif is the refrain in a ghazal, the words every couplet comes back to.

GPL-3.0. Free to use, change and share. If you distribute a version you changed, its source has to be available under the same license. The original copyright and license stay intact.