Aurora Music
GitHub
The YouTube Music player your desktop deserves, with the calm, glassy design of Apple Music. Word-synced lyrics, crossfade, an equaliser, offline downloads and Listen Together. Free and open source, with no ads.
No account needed · Sign in with Google for your library · GPL-3.0
A closer look
Frosted glass, artwork-tinted pages, and a floating tab bar with the mini player riding along. These are real screenshots of the current build.
The engine room
Everything below ships in the current build. The cards are live, so try them.
Word-synced lyrics
Apple Music-style lyrics with word-level timing from BetterLyrics, LRCLIB and YouTube Music. Words fill as they're sung, distant lines soften, and duets split left and right. Click any line to jump to it.
Hold the line a little longer
every echo coming back stronger
(coming back)
and the room goes quiet
sung in full colour
Crossfade & gapless
The next track is already buffered before this one ends. Set a crossfade and the two overlap on equal-power curves, so the level never dips.
Equaliser
Seven bands from 60 Hz to 14 kHz, with automatic headroom so boosts never clip. The curve you see is the curve you hear.
Listen Together
Start a party, share the six-character code, and up to five people hear the same thing in sync. Devices measure their clock offset like NTP and each computes where it should be, so a slow network can't pull anyone off the beat. It speaks BitChord's party protocol, so Android friends can join too.
in sync · ±12 ms
Offline & local
Download any song with its cover to ~/Music/Aurora Music. Add your own folders of MP3, AAC, FLAC, Opus or WAV, and they play right alongside everything else.
Ecosystem
Your Discord status shows what you're playing, using Discord's official RPC. Plays scrobble to Last.fm and ListenBrainz once you've actually heard them.
Release stream
Every build, pulled live from GitHub Releases.
Install
Pick your system. Builds aren't code-signed yet, so each OS asks you to confirm once.
One universal build runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.
Download for macOSOpen the disk image and drop Aurora Music into your Applications folder.
The first time, right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again. After that it launches normally.
One installer for both x64 and ARM64 PCs. Prefer no install? Use the portable .exe.
Download for WindowsWindows warns about new apps. Click More info, then Run anyway.
Aurora Music appears in the Start menu. Media keys and the Windows media flyout just work.
AppImage runs anywhere; .deb for Debian/Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora/openSUSE.
Download AppImagechmod +x Aurora-Music-*.AppImage, or install with sudo apt install ./Aurora-Music-*.deb.
Media keys work through MPRIS, so your desktop's player controls show the song too.
Questions
Yes. There are no ads, no subscription and no tracking. Aurora Music is free software under the GPL-3.0, and the source is on GitHub.
No. You can search and play without signing in. Signing in with Google adds your library, liked songs and personalised home feed. Your session stays encrypted in your system keychain.
To Music/Aurora Music in your home folder, each with its cover image beside it. Downloaded songs play from disk automatically, online or offline.
Yes. Aurora's Listen Together speaks the same party protocol as BitChord on Android, so anyone connected to the same party server shares the party.
No. Aurora Music is an independent project. It's styled after Apple Music's design language and plays from YouTube Music, but it is not endorsed by or connected to either company.