QBZ

QBZ is a free and open source high-fidelity streaming client for Linux and macOS with fully native playback. As of 2.0, the entire app is a single native Rust process built with a Slint UI — no browser engine, no webview — with DAC passthrough, per-track sample rate switching, exclusive mode, and bit-perfect audio delivery.

No API keys needed. No telemetry. No tracking. Just music.

Legal / Branding

• This application uses the Qobuz API but is not certified by Qobuz.
• Qobuz is a trademark of Qobuz. QBZ is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by Qobuz.
• Offline cache is a temporary playback store for listening without an internet connection while you have a valid subscription. If your subscription becomes invalid, QBZ will remove all cached content after 3 days.
• Local library is a "bring your own music" feature — play your own files with bit-perfect audio and the full QBZ interface, no streaming subscription required.
• Qobuz Terms of Service: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/legal/terms

Why QBZ

QBZ exists as the player we wish a streaming company would give its users. It exists to fill the gap of an official client on Linux, because we don't like being second class citizens.

But it is just as important to understand what QBZ is not, and never will be. It is not a web wrapper; I did not just package the web player and "Linuxify" it. It is not a download tool, and it never will be. I built QBZ and not TDL, SPTFY or DZR because I believe music belongs to the artists, and Qobuz is, so far, the fairest option and the one with the best quality. That is why QBZ exists.

It will never have a built-in equalizer or DSP, either. The point is to send audio to your DAC untouched, bit for bit, and any processing would break that. If you want an EQ or effects, add them at the system level, for example with EasyEffects on PipeWire or a JACK graph, which make it easy.

You can download songs to listen to them offline, but they carry the same locks as the official client and the same usage window once your membership expires.

On the technical side: browsers cap audio output at 48 kHz and resample everything through WebAudio. QBZ uses a native playback pipeline with direct device control, so your DAC receives the original resolution, up to 24-bit / 192 kHz, with no forced resampling.

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S qbz-bin    # or paru -S qbz-bin

Flatpak (Flathub)

flatpak install flathub com.blitzfc.qbz

Audiophiles: Flatpak sandboxing limits PipeWire bit-perfect. Use ALSA Direct backend for guaranteed bit-perfect in Flatpak, or install via native packages for full PipeWire support.

Snap

sudo snap install qbz-player
sudo snap connect qbz-player:alsa
sudo snap connect qbz-player:pipewire

Note: After installing, connect ALSA and PipeWire interfaces for full audio support. MPRIS media keys work out of the box.

APT Repository (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)

curl -fsSL https://vicrodh.github.io/qbz-apt/qbz-archive-keyring.gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/qbz-archive-keyring.gpg > /dev/null
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qbz.sources
Types: deb
URIs: https://vicrodh.github.io/qbz-apt
Suites: stable
Components: main
Architectures: $(dpkg --print-architecture)
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/qbz-archive-keyring.gpg
EOF
sudo apt update && sudo apt install qbz

Requires glibc 2.39+ (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+). For older releases use Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage.

RPM (Fedora/openSUSE)

Download from Releases: sudo dnf install ./qbz-*.rpm

Requires glibc 2.39+ (Fedora 40+, openSUSE Tumbleweed).

Gentoo

eselect repository add qbz-overlay git https://github.com/vicrodh/qbz-overlay.git
emerge --sync qbz-overlay
emerge media-sound/qbz-bin    # prebuilt binary (recommended)
# or
emerge media-sound/qbz        # build from source

Source-build warning (yes, even by Gentoo standards): QBZ's UI compiles into one giant generated Rust module — the release build peaks at 20–30 GB of RAM and takes a long while (see The memory wall). Every version bump recompiles it. qbz-bin spares you all of that; the source ebuild is there for those who enjoy the smell of rustc in the morning.

NixOS / Nix

Add the flake input to your flake.nix:

inputs.qbz.url = "github:vicrodh/qbz";

NixOS (system-wide):

{pkgs, inputs, ...}:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [
    inputs.qbz.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];
}

Home Manager:

{pkgs, inputs, ...}:
{
  home.packages = [
    inputs.qbz.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];
}

QBZ is also available in nixpkgs as qbz.

AppImage

Download from Releases: chmod +x QBZ.AppImage && ./QBZ.AppImage

macOS

QBZ is Linux-first, but as of 2.0 macOS is out of its experimental phase and is a stable, fully supported platform — a proper player for Linux and Mac. PipeWire, ALSA, and JACK are Linux-specific backends; macOS plays through its own CoreAudio backend, including a Core Audio Direct passthrough path for bit-perfect output. Casting (Chromecast/DLNA) and Qobuz Connect work on macOS as well.

Download the DMG (Apple Silicon or Intel) from Releases and drag QBZ into Applications.

First launch: QBZ is ad-hoc signed but NOT notarized (no Apple Developer subscription), so Gatekeeper will block the first run — and on recent macOS (Sequoia / 15 and later) the old right-click → Open trick no longer works for un-notarized apps. Two ways to unlock it, pick one:

• Settings route: try to open QBZ once (it gets blocked), then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message that QBZ was blocked, and click Open Anyway.

• Terminal route (what the settings toggle does, minus the clicking):

  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/QBZ.app
  

  This removes the quarantine attribute macOS stamps on downloaded files — it's a one-time unlock for this copy of the app; updates installed through QBZ's own updater don't need it again.

Features

Audio and Playback

• Bit-perfect playback with DAC passthrough and per-track sample rate switching (44.1–192 kHz)
• Linux backends: PipeWire, ALSA (with a Direct hw: bypass mode), PulseAudio, and JACK — all hardened in 2.0, PipeWire/PulseAudio work out of the box
• macOS backend: CoreAudio, including a Core Audio Direct passthrough path for bit-perfect output
• HiFi Wizard — revamped in 2.0 with real hardware auto-detection and a simpler, guided bit-perfect setup
• Native decoding: FLAC, MP3, AAC, ALAC, WavPack, Ogg Vorbis, Opus (Symphonia)
• DSD support — DSF/DFF playback with DSD-to-PCM conversion, DoP, and native DSD passthrough (ALSA)
• Gapless playback on all backends
• Loudness normalization (EBU R128) with ReplayGain support
• Two-level audio cache with next-track prefetching
• Streaming playback — start listening before download completes

Queue and Library

• Queue with shuffle, repeat (track/queue/off), and history
• Favorites and playlists from your Qobuz account
• Qobuz playlist follow/unfollow — subscribe natively, syncs across all Qobuz clients
• Local library — directory scanning, metadata extraction, CUE sheets, SQLite indexing; usable without ever logging into Qobuz
• Artist/album blacklist — block artists or individual albums, not just genres; fully reversible
• Tag editor with sidecar storage (preserves original files)
• Virtualized lists for large libraries

Qobuz Connect

Multi-device playback control using Qobuz's real-time streaming protocol. Considerably more stable as of 2.0, though full 1:1 parity with the official clients is still in progress.

• Renderer mode — receive playback commands from your phone, tablet, or web player
• Controller mode — control remote devices from QBZ
• Server-authoritative queue sync across all devices
• Bidirectional transport: play, pause, skip, seek, shuffle, repeat, volume

Casting

• Chromecast and DLNA/UPnP discovery and streaming
• Seamless playback handoff to network devices

Integrations

• MPRIS media controls and media keys
• Last.fm scrobbling and now-playing
• ListenBrainz scrobbling with offline queue
• MusicBrainz artist enrichment, musician credits, relationships (no telemetry — one-way pull)
• Discogs artwork for local library
• Playlist import from Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer
• Desktop notifications with artwork

Immersive Player

• Full-screen player with tabbed panel system, trimmed and re-tuned in 2.0 to stop being a resource drain
• Multiple full-bleed view modes — Album Reactive, Coverflow, Static, Spectrum, Wave Bed, Lyrics — plus GPU shader scenes (Plasma, Tunnel, Aurora, Spectral Ribbon, Line Bed)
• Search overlay works inside Immersive mode — switch albums without leaving the view
• Synchronized lyrics with line-by-line display
• Split-panel layouts: Lyrics, Track Info, Suggestions, Queue

Discovery

• Scene Discovery — explore artists by location and musical scene (MusicBrainz-powered)
• 3-tab Home: customizable Home, Editor's Picks, personalized For You
• Recommendations — Last.fm and ListenBrainz/MusicBrainz-powered discovery based on your listening history, similarities, and local-listen vectorization
• Live search overlay with a small cache layer that learns your preferences and stops surfacing results you never touch
• Genre filtering, artist similarity engine, radio stations
• Musician pages, label pages, album credits

Interface

• 30+ themes (Dark, OLED, Nord, Dracula, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Breeze, Adwaita...)
• Auto-theme from DE, wallpaper, or custom image
• Mini player
• Album booklets download to your device — the old in-app PDF reader was dropped in 2.0 to keep the binary lean
• Configurable keyboard shortcuts, UI scale presets (XS–XL)
• 8 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Dutch
• Offline mode usable without ever logging into Qobuz, with fully offline playlists and automatic reconnection

Headless Daemon (qbzd)

Run QBZ without a screen: qbzd is a standalone ~25 MB binary (shipped inside the deb/rpm packages and as its own tarball) that turns any Linux box — a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, the living-room mini-PC — into a bit-perfect Qobuz Connect endpoint that appears in the official Qobuz apps like a hardware streamer.

• Daemon + full CLI + terminal setup wizard (TUI) in one binary
• Browser-based login that works over SSH; one-file settings hand-off from desktop QBZ
• HiFi wizard with copyable audio-stack config blocks (clipboard works over SSH)
• MPRIS out of the box, live JSON events (qbzd watch), service files for systemd/OpenRC/runit

Full manual: Headless Daemon (qbzd) — Wiki

Kiosk Mode

For Raspberry screens and handheld consoles.

A touch-first face for touchscreens and small panels: set QBZ_PROFILE=kiosk and QBZ boots a big-target shell with its own NavRail, touch scrolling, an on-screen keyboard, and a centerpiece Now Playing with cover↔lyrics toggle and queue/history tabs. Switch between Kiosk and Desktop live from the Now Playing layout menu; fullscreen is opt-in via QBZ_KIOSK_FULLSCREEN=1.

Tech Stack

As of 2.0, QBZ is a single native Rust process: the Slint UI runs in-process and talks to the same Rust core crates directly through callbacks and shared state — there is no browser engine, no webview, and no IPC bridge to serialize across (the old Tauri command-invoke boundary is gone entirely).

Multi-Crate Architecture

The Rust workspace lives entirely under crates/ (manifest crates/Cargo.toml); the qbz crate is the binary, qbz-ui holds the Slint views and view-models. A representative slice of the 36 workspace members:

crates/
  qbz/                   Binary crate: app entrypoint, window/renderer setup, wiring
  qbz-ui/                Slint views (.slint) and view-model glue
  qbz-app/               Application-level orchestration (non-UI)
  qbz-theme/             Theme engine (30+ themes)
  qbz-i18n/              Bundled translations (7 locales)
  qbz-models/            Shared domain types
  qbz-audio/             Audio backends, loudness, device management
  qbz-player/            Playback engine, streaming, queue
  qbz-qobuz/             Qobuz API client and auth
  qbz-core/              Orchestrator (player + audio + API)
  qbz-library/           Local library scanning and metadata
  qbz-dsd/               DSD (DSF/DFF) decoding, DoP, native DSD packing
  qbz-plex/              Plex library integration
  qbz-integrations/      Last.fm, ListenBrainz, MusicBrainz, Discogs
  qbz-reco/ qbz-external-reco/  Recommendations engine
  qbz-lyrics/            Lyrics (Qobuz-native, external fallback)
  qbz-mixtape/           Mixtape/DJ-mix generation
  qbz-playlist-import/   Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer import
  qbz-media-controls/    MPRIS / SMTC / MPNowPlayingInfoCenter
  qbz-dac-wizard/        HiFi Wizard (hardware auto-detection)
  qbz-cache/             L1 memory + L2 disk audio caching
  qbz-cast/              Chromecast, DLNA/UPnP
  qbz-credentials/ qbz-secrets/  Auth/token storage
  qconnect-protocol/     Qobuz Connect protobuf wire format
  qconnect-core/         Queue and renderer domain models
  qconnect-app/          Application logic and concurrency
  qconnect-transport-ws/ WebSocket transport with qcloud framing

Building from Source

QBZ 2.0 is a pure Rust workspace — there is no Node.js, no npm install, no webview. The workspace manifest is crates/Cargo.toml, and the app binary is the qbz crate inside it.

Prerequisites

• Rust stable for a plain cargo build, or the nightly toolchain if you use the repo's build scripts (they pass -Z threads to parallelize the compiler frontend — see below).
• Linux or macOS with audio support. On Linux the scripts use mold as linker (install it, or edit the RUSTFLAGS they set); plain cargo build needs neither nightly nor mold.
• No Node.js/npm required.

System Dependencies

Verified against the project's own Linux CI build (.github/workflows/build-slint.yml):

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config cmake clang libclang-dev nasm \
  libasound2-dev libjack-jackd2-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libxcb1-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev \
  libdbus-1-dev libssl-dev

Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, and other distros: package names differ; look for the equivalents of the Debian list above (a C compiler + clang/libclang, cmake, nasm, ALSA + JACK dev headers, fontconfig/freetype, Wayland/X11/xkbcommon, Mesa GL/EGL, D-Bus, and OpenSSL dev headers). Please open a PR if you confirm exact package names for your distro.

macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and a Rust toolchain — that's it.

⚠ The memory wall (read this before your first build)

Slint compiles the entire UI into ONE generated Rust module (~1.6 M lines for QBZ). A single release rustc invocation for that crate peaks at 20–30 GB of RAM. This is a one-time cost per profile — once the UI crate is cached, incremental builds are cheap — but the first build WILL hit it, and on a machine without enough headroom the compiler gets OOM-killed (or worse, swap-freezes the box).

The knobs that tame it (each lowers peak memory at some compile-time or runtime-optimization cost):

If you have < 32 GB of RAM, this works on any machine down to ~16 GB (+ swap) — it is literally the recipe our 16 GB CI runners use; expect it to be slow (2–3 h from scratch) rather than to fail:

CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=1 \
CARGO_PROFILE_RELEASE_CODEGEN_UNITS=256 \
CARGO_PROFILE_RELEASE_OPT_LEVEL=2 \
cargo build --release --manifest-path crates/Cargo.toml -p qbz

If you have ≥ 32 GB free, the plain build is fine and much faster:

git clone https://github.com/vicrodh/qbz.git && cd qbz
cargo build --release --manifest-path crates/Cargo.toml -p qbz
./crates/target/release/qbz

The convenient way (Linux): scripts/slint-run.sh

The repo ships the build script we use ourselves — it reads MemAvailable and picks a tier automatically, so you don't have to think about any of the above:

./scripts/slint-run.sh          # build (auto-tier) and run the binary
NORUN=1 ./scripts/slint-run.sh  # build only
FAST=1  ./scripts/slint-run.sh  # force the fast tier (close your apps first)
THREADS=4 CODEGEN_UNITS=128 OPT=3 ./scripts/slint-run.sh  # manual override

It requires the nightly toolchain and mold. Note that SAFE/MIN produce a functionally identical but not byte-identical binary vs FAST (different codegen-units/opt-level), and switching tiers forces a one-time rebuild of the UI crate.

Development iteration: release vs fast-debug

Two dev loops, on purpose:

• ./scripts/slint-dev.sh — builds and runs in release mode with the parallel compiler frontend. This is the default dev loop: runtime performance is the whole reason QBZ is a native app, so we always test at release perf and a regression can never hide behind "it's just dev mode". The binary is the same optimized artifact as cargo build --release; only compile time improves.
• ./scripts/slint-dev-fast.sh — debug build, dramatically faster to compile and far lighter on RAM. Use it for purely visual/layout iteration where runtime performance does not matter. Never benchmark on it.

On macOS use ./scripts/slint-dev-mac.sh (same intent, Apple-toolchain flags; works on Apple Silicon and Intel — an 8 GB M-series Mac builds fine, just slowly, thanks to macOS's aggressive swap).

Nix / NixOS

flake.nix builds the same qbz binary via rustPlatform.buildRustPackage (cargoBuildFlags = [ "-p" "qbz" ], root at crates/) — see the NixOS / Nix install section above, or run nix build / nix develop directly from a checkout.

API Proxy

Last.fm, Discogs, Tidal, Spotify-import, and MusicBrainz traffic goes through a hosted Cloudflare Workers proxy (qbz-api-proxy.blitzkriegfc.workers.dev) that holds all credentials server-side. Both pre-built releases and source builds use it out of the box — no API keys or .env file required.

If you want to run against your own proxy (for development, or if you fork QBZ), the proxy source lives at vicrodh/qbz-api-proxy. Deploy it with wrangler deploy and then edit the *_PROXY_URL constants in crates/qbz-integrations/src/lastfm/client.rs, crates/qbz-integrations/src/discogs/mod.rs, crates/qbz-playlist-import/src/providers/tidal.rs, and crates/qbz-integrations/src/musicbrainz/client.rs to point at your worker before rebuilding.

Environment Variables

As of 2.0, QBZ auto-detects a working renderer (GPU wgpu → femtovg/OpenGL → software) at startup across Wayland/X11/Metal, so there is normally nothing to configure. One override remains for diagnostics or a broken GPU stack:

If QBZ fails to start, try QBZ_RENDERER=software qbz first.

Known Issues

• Hi-Res seeking — seeking in tracks >96kHz can take 10-20s (decoder must scan from start). Use prev/next for instant navigation.
• ALSA Direct — exclusive access blocks other apps. Use DAC/amplifier physical volume control.
• PipeWire bit-perfect in Flatpak — limited by sandbox. Use ALSA Direct or native packages.
• DSD DoP / native mode — seeking is disabled and volume is fixed while a DoP or native-DSD stream is active (any sample manipulation would corrupt the DSD stream). Convert-to-PCM mode has no such limits.

Documentation

User guides, audio configuration, integrations, and troubleshooting: QBZ Wiki (work in progress).

Open Source

QBZ is MIT-licensed. No telemetry, no tracking, no hidden services. Built for Linux and macOS audio enthusiasts.

Contributing

Contributions welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting issues or pull requests.

Contributors

• @vorce
• @boxdot
• @arminfelder
• @afonsojramos — macOS port
• @Vudgekek — macOS audio
• @GwendalBeaumont — i18n
• @AdamArstall
• @DoubleGate

License

MIT