The QTube Music icon: a vinyl record whose tonearm forms the Q

QTube Music

A native Mac app for YouTube Music

  1. Lyrics light up word by word.
  2. A translation sits under each line.
  3. Switch between the song and its music video.
  4. Full-screen player, mini player, menu bar player.
  5. Works with free and Premium accounts.
  6. Under 1% CPU when idle.
  7. Only music: no Shorts, no podcasts, no comments.

macOS 15 or later
Apple silicon and Intel

Download for Mac

Why QTube Music

The inspiration is NetEase Cloud Music. Its player is the best I've used: lyrics that light up word by word with a translation under each line, a full-screen player with a spinning record, and lyrics on the desktop. I wanted that for YouTube Music, and none of the YouTube Music apps on the Mac comes close.

The YouTube Music website
There's no Mac app at all. The library loads as you scroll, so you can't sort it or jump to a letter, and the queue is hard to find. Lyrics are never word by word, and there's no translation.
Electron wrappers
Apps like th-ch's YouTube Music put the website in a window and run a whole copy of Chrome underneath it. You get the website's interface, and every gap the website has.
Kaset
No full-screen player. The music video button is greyed out for most songs, and there's no way to switch between a song and its video. Tracks sometimes stop instead of moving on, it can show up twice in Now Playing, and a single click plays a song instead of selecting it.
YTubic
Premium accounts only. Its Song/Video switch only swaps the audio; you never see a video. Lyrics go line by line, with no translation. Every track starts a separate yt-dlp process, so there's no gapless playback, and it breaks when YouTube changes something.
JustAnotherMusicClient
No full-screen player and no music videos. It plays through a hidden YouTube player, so some songs just fail with an error. On my Mac it used about 100% CPU and 800 MB of memory while paused. The window buttons sit on the right, Windows-style, and ⌘Space for search clashes with Spotlight.

QTube Music has all of it: a full-screen player with five backgrounds, lyrics that light up word by word with a translation under each line, real music videos you can switch to without losing your place, desktop lyrics and a mini player. It's built in SwiftUI and AppKit, idles under 1% CPU, and works with free accounts.