Sunder is billed as a lightweight, native desktop music player that streams from YouTube without the bloat. Built with Tauri v2 and Rust, it uses a fraction of the memory that Electron-based alternatives consume while delivering a buttery smooth UI with hand-crafted animations.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Playback:
- YouTube search with instant results and FTS5-powered local caching.
- Native audio via rodio, talking directly to ALSA/PipeWire/Pulse with no Web Audio overhead.
- Smart error recovery if a track fails (geo-blocked, age-gated, unavailable), a banner appears .offering to find an alternative version automatically, with auto-skip fallback if ignored.
- Retry with bypass yt-dlp failures trigger a silent retry with –force-ipv4 and –geo-bypass before giving up.
- Prefetching silently pre-downloads upcoming tracks for seamless transitions.
- Queue:
- Three-section view: Now Playing card, Next Up (with drag-to-reorder), Previously Played.
- Fluid animations track cards slide and flip into position when the song changes, when you drag-reorder, or when tracks enter/leave the queue.
- Context menu integration right-click any track to play next, add/remove from queue, add to or remove from a playlist.
- Auto-advance: queue advances automatically on track end; stops gracefully after 3 consecutive errors.
- Playlists.
- Full CRUD with inline rename, quick-play, and drag-to-reorder.
- Remove from context menu right-click any track to remove it from the current playlist
- App:
- Explore with personalized recommendations built from your listening history.
- Warm animated UI with spring physics, staggered entrances, glow pulses, and micro-interactions.
- ~15MB binary with release optimizations (LTO, strip, single codegen unit).
- Zero telemetry. Nothing leaves your machine except YouTube search queries.
Website: github.com/FrogSnot/Sunder
Support:
Developer: FrogSnoth
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Sunder is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| YouTube Tools | |
|---|---|
| SpMp | YouTube music client with a focus on customization |
| FreeTube | Privacy-based YouTube app |
| Media Downloader | Frontend for youtube-dl, gallery-dl, Lux, you-get, svtplay-dl, aria2c, ... |
| pipe-viewer | Lightweight YouTube client without requiring an API key |
| Piped | Uses NewPipe Extractor, a library for extracting |
| AudioTube | Qt-based music streamer |
| ClipGrab | Downloader for YouTube and other sites |
| Minitube | Application for watching YouTube without using Flash |
| youtube-local | Browser-based YouTube client |
| SMTube | Search, play and download YouTube videos |
| MellowPlayer | Multi-platform cloud music integration |
| PlasmaTube | Designed to be integrated with KDE Plasma |
| Video Downloader | Tool which lets you download videos from YouTube and other websites |
| VacuumTube | Unofficial wrapper of YouTube Leanback |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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