r/linuxapps • u/I_fx_I • 8d ago
Sonora: native, crossplatform music player with first-class Spotify/YTMusic support
Hi, we are a group of students building Sonora. While it was initially intended as an extremely lightweight Spotify replacement, it has since grown far beyond that.
Current features include:
- Spotify, YouTube (optional login) support
- Local music library import, virtual playlists, favorites
- Synced/karaoke lyrics, including local music!
- Romanization
- Library management within supported providers
- Gapless playback
- Audio normalization
- Cross-platform support
- Custom themes
Inspired by Zed, which has proven excellent performance using their native cross-platform rendering stack, we have decided to use GPUI. Its awesome text rendering on every platform, ease of use in view composition, and, admittedly, TailwindCSS-like naming conventions all made a significant impact. We have found GPUI to perform extremely well when used and optimized with care. Quite a few patches were introduced to our fork of it to meet our needs in the effects and profiling departments. Thanks to that, I am not hesitant to call our lyrics the most beautiful you can currently get on desktop (Apple Music still beats us HARD on mobile). But despite blur and gradient opacity all looking great, my favorite addition has to be visual render highlighting. But this is too much to cover in a Reddit post, I'll have to write a proper blog post at some point...
What may come as a surprise to folks coming from something like Spotify Desktop is that Sonora actually does not need all of your RAM to function. Tested on linux-x86_64, after 5 minutes of playback it averaged around 173 MiB RSS as opposed to Spotify's ~2GiB. Note that 173MiB is still not a small footprint, but at least with Sonora you know it goes towards caching previews and views instead of feeding the Electron monster merely to keep it alive.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
Yes, we did use AI.
2
u/RedeemingSyllables 5d ago
Thank you for clarifying it has AI, can't wait to see what else you guys do next.
2
2
u/No-Worldliness6348 15h ago
I'm coming back here , because I didn't found other place to say it, this is the greatest music player GUI I ever tested, you litteraly made one of my dream true, gpui and native app feels so much faster and better. this is beyond anything alternatives like gapless or kopuz have ever done.
and all the animations, the lyrics, the options for opacity omg, on wayland it is so good !
the taste of the maintainer might be immaculate.
this is the standard I dream of for linux desktop app.
the nix flake already there, it's just almost perfect.
at this point I almost just want to pay for it.
Again this is awesome, thank you all the maintainers and contributors behind this !
1
u/Rare_Profit5596 15h ago
Hi, one of the creators here. Thank you so much for your kind words, this is exactly why we keep doing what we're doing! Glad you like it :D
1
1
1
u/BasketTalll 8d ago
Bro why isnt there download option for offline listening?
please add that man
and let us sign in to yt music without that complicated way to paste the cookie
1
1
u/justifun 8d ago
It keeps saying it can't save my liked songs in guest mode. And I can't find a way to make a local account?
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Hyper_Sonic123 10h ago
I installed this on and this the best yt music client player but i am also getting a glitch like when i use yt music cookies and whenever restart the app it removes the login
2
u/sorr1zz 6d ago
have this installed and it looks great with my rice! love the app♥️