Riff ~ FOSS Cross-platform Music App


Riff is an open-source, telemetry-free desktop music app and player for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It unifies playback across YouTube Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, and offline local media into a single high-performance interface without ads, subscriptions, or login constraints. Provides very fancy UI and layout.

Built with Electron, Vanilla JavaScript, and WebGL, Riff provides responsive UI interactions and hardware-accelerated audio visualization without runtime framework overhead. The project is distributed under the MIT license and enforces strict privacy: all configuration, cached streams, and playback history remain strictly on the local machine.

Features:

  • High quality streaming with YouTube Music, YouTube, and SoundCloud without third-party advertisements or account requirements
  • Offline lossless playback with full local library support for high resolution formats including FLAC, WAV, MP3, OGG, and M4A.
  • Easy built-in audio editor, downloading with effects or trimming 10-band & 3-band equalizer, and real-time DSP effects (speed, pitch, reverb, distortion).
  • 1-Click multi-platform playlist migration: Direct import and resolution of public playlists from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and SoundCloud
  • Material Design 3 UI: Dynamic color extraction from album artwork, deep UI theming, responsive layout presets, and an integrated CSS editor
  • Hardware-Accelerated Visuals: Canvas and WebGL visualizers including real-time frequency analyzers, an interactive squiggly progress scrubber, and synchronized karaoke lyrics.
  • Discord Rich Presence: Real-time playback status reporting track metadata, artist info, and elapsed time to Discord.
  • Zero Telemetry: No tracking identifiers, analytics pings, or background data collection.
  • Fullscreen mode with fancy lyrics animation.
  • Albums – see all of your favorite artist albums.
  • Customization – built in theme editor, configure everything, and a CSS editor, with animated backgrounds and interface opacity sliders.
  • Plugins – built-in plugin feature where you can add a plugin to edit how Riff works with something or add a new function.

riff.hs.vc
github.com/rootscripts/riff

SoundCraft ~ Avid Pro Tools Reimplementation


Recording, editing and mixing audio; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools, rebuilt in pure Rust.

A complete digital audio workstation that runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser. Multitrack editing, a full mixer with plugins, sends and automation, MIDI, recording and bouncing, and every action scriptable from the command line or by an AI agent.

soundcraft user interface

github.com/storytold/soundcraft
sourceforge.net/projects/soundcraft.mirror

Pear Desktop ~ Desktop Client For YouTube Music


Pear Desktop is an Electron-based desktop client for YouTube Music designed for Windows, Linux and macOS. The project keeps the standard YouTube Music interface while adding desktop integration, plugins, themes and additional playback features.

The application is open source and distributed under the MIT license.

Features:

  • Native desktop-style window and controls
  • Plugin framework
  • Ad blocker
  • Lyrics support
  • Last.fm scrobbling
  • Discord Rich Presence
  • Media key support
  • Custom themes and CSS
  • Audio compressor
  • Equalizer
  • Crossfade
  • Skip silences
  • SponsorBlock integration
  • Video/audio mode toggle
  • Notification support
  • Downloader plugin
  • OBS integration
  • System tray support
  • Global keyboard shortcuts

How It Works

Pear Desktop loads the standard YouTube Music web interface inside a desktop application window and extends it through plugins and Electron desktop integration. It is not a standalone music service and still requires a YouTube Music or Google account for normal use.

Basic Usage

  1. Download the correct installer for your operating system from the Releases page.
  2. Install and launch the application.
  3. Sign into your Google account.
  4. Use YouTube Music normally.
  5. Optional plugins can be enabled or disabled from the Plugins menu.

Platforms

  • Windows
  • Linux
  • macOS

Notes

Because Pear Desktop uses Electron, memory and CPU usage are generally higher than lightweight native audio players such as foobar2000 or AIMP. The project is intended primarily as a feature-enhanced desktop frontend for streaming music from YouTube Music rather than as a traditional local-library music player.

github.com/pear-devs/pear-desktop

Audion ~ Community Driven Music Player


Audion is a privacy-focused music player that brings the Spotify experience to your local music library. No internet required, no tracking, just your music, beautifully organized.

Key highlights:

  • Synced lyrics with karaoke-style word highlighting
  • Extensible plugin system
  • Gorgeous, customizable interface
  • Fully offline

www.audionplayer.com
github.com/dupitydumb/Audion

FeelUOwn ~ Hackable Music Player


trying to be a robust, user-friendly and hackable music player

Features:

  • Stable and Easy to Use
  • One-click installation, packaged for all popular platforms (e.g., Arch Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.)
  • Plug-ins for various media resource platforms, making full and reasonable use of free online resources (e.g., YouTube Music)
  • Comprehensive basic functions, including desktop lyrics, intelligent resource replacement, multiple audio quality options, and the nowplaying protocol
  • Core modules have good test coverage, and core interfaces maintain good backward compatibility
  • Large-scale support: AI radio, natural language to playlist conversion, etc.
  • High Playability:
    • Provides a TCP-based interactive control protocol
    • Provides an MCP Server (experimental feature) for programmatic control of player/resource capabilities
  • Text-based playlists for easy sharing with friends and synchronization across devices
  • Supports Python-based configuration files (.fuorc), similar to .vimrc and .emacs

github.com/feeluown
github.com/feeluown/FeelUOwn
sourceforge.net/projects/feeluown.mirror
github.com/feeluown/feeluown-bilibili
github.com/feeluown/feeluown-download
github.com/feeluown/homebrew-feeluown
github.com/feeluown/feeluown-kuwo
github.com/feeluown/feeluown-ytmusic

PedalBoard ~ Python Audio Library


pedalboard is a Python library for working with audio: reading, writing, rendering, adding effects, and more. It supports most popular audio file formats and a number of common audio effects out of the box, and also allows the use of VST3® and Audio Unit formats for loading third-party software instruments and effects.

Features:

  • Built-in audio I/O utilities (pedalboard.io)
    • Support for reading and writing AIFF, FLAC, MP3, OGG, and WAV files on all platforms with no dependencies
    • Additional support for reading AAC, AC3, WMA, and other formats depending on platform
    • Support for on-the-fly resampling of audio files and streams with O(1) memory usage
    • Live audio effects via AudioStream
  • Built-in support for a number of basic audio transformations, including:
    • Guitar-style effects: Chorus, Distortion, Phaser, Clipping
    • Loudness and dynamic range effects: Compressor, Gain, Limiter
    • Equalizers and filters: HighpassFilter, LadderFilter, LowpassFilter
    • Spatial effects: Convolution, Delay, Reverb
    • Pitch effects: PitchShift
    • Lossy compression: GSMFullRateCompressor, MP3Compressor
    • Quality reduction: Resample, Bitcrush
  • Supports VST3® instrument and effect plugins on macOS, Windows, and Linux (pedalboard.load_plugin)
  • Supports instrument and effect Audio Units on macOS
  • Strong thread-safety, memory usage, and speed guarantees
    • Releases Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) to allow use of multiple CPU cores
      • No need to use multiprocessing!
    • Even when only using one thread:
      • Processes audio up to 300x faster than pySoX for single transforms, and 2-5x faster than SoxBindings (via iCorv)
      • Reads audio files up to 4x faster than librosa.load (in many cases)
  • Tested compatibility with TensorFlow – can be used in tf.data pipelines!

github.com/spotify/pedalboard

Partiels ~ Audio Analysis Application


Partiels is an audio analysis application that allows you to explore the content and characteristics of sounds.

Features:

Partiels allows analysis of one or several audio files using Vamp plug-ins loading data files, visualizing, editing, organizing, and exporting the results as images or text files that can be used in other applications such as Max, Pure Data, Open Music, etc.

  • Windows, Mac & Linux support
  • Multiformat support
  • Multichannel support
  • Multiaudiofile support
  • Analyzing audio with Vamp plug-ins
  • Visualizing results as spectrogram, lines, and markers
  • Textual and graphical editing of results 
  • Organizing and ordering analyses in groups
  • Exporting results to PNG, JPEG, CSV, LAB, JSON, CUE, REAPER & SDIF formats
  • Loading results from CSV, LAB, JSON, CUE & SDIF formats
  • Batch processing
  • Command line interface to analyze, export, and convert results
  • Consolidating documents for sharing

Alongside Partiels, a wide range of analyses based on audio engines developed at IRCAM and outside are ported to Vamp plug-ins. These plug-ins allow you to perform FFT, LPC, transient, fundamental, formant, tempo, TTS and many other analyses. You can also find a large number of analysis plug-ins on the Vamp plug-ins website.

github.com/Ircam-Partiels
www.vamp-plugins.org

Glimpse ~ Free, Fast & Extensible Player


The free, fast and extensible music player.

glimpseaudio.co.uk
github.com/aquagoose/Glimpse

Euphonium ~ Multiplatform Extensible Audio Streaming


Euphonium is a highly extensible audio streaming software. It’s multiplatform, also supporting low cost MCU’s like espressif ESP32 series.

Features:

  • Clean and lightweight web-ui.
  • Supports multiple plugins: Spotify streaming, Bluetooth (on esp32), Web Radio, Jellyfin.
  • Fully modular architecture.
  • Easily extendible and portable to new hardware, thanks to the internal Berry-lang powered scripting engine.

Required hardware for esp32:

  • Any ESP32 chip with at least 4MB of flash and 4MB of PSRAM. Wrover chips are usually a good call. 🙂
muvox-io.github.io/euphonium
github.com/muvox-io/euphonium

Buzztrax ~ All In One Music Composer


Buzztrax aims to be a music studio that allows one to compose songs using only a computer with a soundcard. If you’ve used tracker programs like FastTracker, Impulse Tracker, or the original AMIGA SoundTracker, that will give you an idea of how one can sequence music in Buzztrax.

The Buzztrax editor uses a similar concept, where a song consists of a sequence with tracks and in each track one uses patterns with events (musical notes and control changes). In contrast to other Tracker programs, tracks are not simply sample players: a user can make a song using an arrangement of virtual audio plugins that are linked together to create different effects. Each of these machines can be controlled real-time or via patterns in the sequencer.

www.buzztrax.org
Buzztrax User Interface Image

Fooyin ~ Linux Audio Player


Fooyin is a customisable music player for Linux. Fooyin features a layout editing mode in which the entire user interface can be customised, starting from a blank state or a default layout. FooScript takes this further by extending the customisation to individual widgets themselves.

Features:

  • Playback FLAC, MP3, MP4, Vorbis, Opus, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Monkey’s Audio
  •  Playback popular VGM and tracker module formats
  •  Gapless playback
  •  Add and play files from within compressed archives
  •  Audio output and device configuration
  •  CUE sheet support (including embedded)
  •  Fully customisable layout, starting from a blank window
  •  Customisable keyboard shortcuts
  •  Filter library on any field(s)
  •  Create and manage playlists
  •  Import/export playlists (M3U/M3U8)
  •  Extensible using a plugin system
  •  Tag editing
  •  Library tree, including directory structure view
  •  Directory browser
  •  Waveform seekbar
  •  MPRIS support
  •  ReplayGain support
  •  Scrobbling

www.fooyin.org
github.com/ludouzi/fooyin

ExoPlayer ~ Extensible Android Media Player


ExoPlayer is an application level media player for Android. It provides an alternative to Android’s MediaPlayer API for playing audio and video both locally and over the Internet. ExoPlayer supports features not currently supported by Android’s MediaPlayer API, including DASH and SmoothStreaming adaptive playbacks. Unlike the MediaPlayer API, ExoPlayer is easy to customize and extend, and can be updated through Play Store application updates. ExoPlayer modules can be obtained from JCenter. It’s also possible to clone the repository and depend on the modules locally. The easiest way to get started using ExoPlayer is to add it as a gradle dependency. You need to make sure you have the Google and JCenter repositories included in the build.gradle file in the root of your project. n addition to library modules, ExoPlayer has multiple extension modules that depend on external libraries to provide additional functionality. Some extensions are available from JCenter.

Features:

  • Provides an alternative to Android’s MediaPlayer API
  • Plays audio and video both locally and over the Internet
  • DASH and SmoothStreaming adaptive playbacks
  • Easy to customize and extend, and can be updated through Play Store application updates
  • ExoPlayer modules can be obtained from JCenter
  • Clone the repository and depend on the modules locally

github.com/google/ExoPlayer