Sunder – desktop YouTube music client

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.

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