yt-collate

Motivation: This is a personal passion project I made in my spare time, after I realized no YTM client had all the features/specs/quirks I wanted

A Terminal User Interface client for YouTube Music, with a focus on efficiency and ease-of-use while also offering a comprehensive feature list.

Originally planned to only focus on gathering/arranging tracks in playlists (hence name), Collate has become a full-fledged music client that is reliable and "just works". Developed for Linux and Mac.

Built with Textual, ytmusicapi, mpv, and yt-dlp. Keybinds are a mix of Vim binds and general binds for efficient keyboard navigation (mouse is supported as well). Collate is inspired by youtube-music-cli and yazi; check them out!

Home page, with personalized recommendations once authenticated

Features

• Clean, minimalistic, modern TUI client for YouTube Music
• Extremely fast, lightweight, and responsive
• Authentication to access your Library and personalized recommendations
• Includes YouTube Music Home, Explore, Search, and Trending pages
• Smooth playback experience, with a simple dynamic queue
• Download songs/playlists to local / automatic audio retrieval from local
• Vast set of intuitive keybinds (e.g. n for next track, d to download, etc.)
• Easy management of Library (e.g. o to create playlist, x to delete song/playlist, etc.)
• "Marking" playlists to easily add to collection from anywhere
• YouTube Music subscribers benefit from enhanced audio bitrate (both streams and downloads)
• Discord Rich Presence integration

Distinct Touches

• Has Vim's "unnamed register" for x (cut), y (yank), and p (put/paste) for songs
• 0-9 keys jump around current track, imitating YouTube's playback keybinds
• Audio bitrate indicator, originally added to verify enhanced premium bitrate
• Local filter / can jump to line numbers, allowing fast go-tos
• Search screen accepts YouTube URLs, useful if you prefer exploring YouTube on a browser (me)
• Option to hide "Episodes for Later" in Library, I'm sure many find this annoying (me)
• No concept of "unshuffle", s reshuffles queue everytime; I have no use "unshuffling" my queue

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12+
• mpv
• yt-dlp (nightly build) (Certain non-music videos will not play on current stable build. Can run yt-dlp --update-to nightly)
• Deno or Node or QuickJS (A JS runtime is needed for yt-dlp to reliably fetch)

Install / Update

pipx install yt-collate

Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH. When a new version is released, update with:

pipx upgrade yt-collate

Collate is also available on AUR:

yay -S yt-collate

Library playlist, with a local filter (/) and download notification

Usage

To set up authentication, run:

yt-collate auth

and follow the prompts. The file is written to ~/.config/yt-collate/browser.json, and this will likely last a few years. Run Collate with:

yt-collate

Press ? in-app to view list of all keybinds.

Config

Data lives under ~/.config/yt-collate/. Downloads appear in ~/Music/yt-collate.

Development

Contributions are welcome! As a start, consider adding your favorite genre to GENRES in src/services/random_song.py.

uv sync --group dev # install dev packages
uv run pytest # for testing
uv run ruff check . # for linting/formatting