Tubefast GitHub

YouTube Music,
native and fast.

Tubefast is a desktop player for Windows, macOS and Linux, written in Rust. It talks to YouTube directly, decodes the audio itself and draws every pixel natively. There is no Chromium and no WebView inside.

Download Read the source on GitHub

For Windows, macOS and Linux. See how to install on yours.

Tubefast playing a track, with the home feed in the middle and the queue on the right

What it costs to run

  • 0.1–0.3 s

    Until the window is on screen

  • ~100 MB

    Memory while playing

    About 60 MB of it is private. This is the working set a few seconds into playback. It grows with window size and with how much artwork you have scrolled past.

  • under 1 %

    CPU while playing

    The window repaints only when something changes, so an idle one uses no CPU.

  • 9 MB

    The whole program

    One exe. Nothing is installed and nothing is left behind when you delete it, apart from your library in your user profile.

Measured on the release build on Windows 11. The first launch from a new folder used about 60 MB more on the test machine (NVIDIA driver), once.

What you get

How it stays small

Install

Windows

With Scoop

Scoop installs it without a Windows warning.

scoop install https://github.com/yigitbozyaka/tubefast/releases/latest/download/tubefast.json

By hand

  1. Download tubefast-windows-x64.zip.
  2. Right-click the zip, choose Properties, tick Unblock and press OK.
  3. Unzip it anywhere and run tubefast.exe.

Step 2 is there because Tubefast is not code signed. Windows trusts a new program only after enough people have run it, so without that step the first launch shows “Windows protected your PC”. If you see it, choose More info, then Run anyway.

macOS

Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 11 or later

  1. Download tubefast-macos-universal.zip and unzip it.
  2. Move Tubefast.app to Applications.
  3. Clear the download flag once, then open it as usual:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tubefast.app

Step 3 is there because Tubefast is not notarized by Apple yet. Without it, macOS says the app “is damaged and can’t be opened”.

Linux

AppImage

For x86-64 distributions with glibc 2.35 or newer, such as Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or Fedora 36. Download Tubefast-x86_64.AppImage, make it executable and run it:

chmod +x Tubefast-x86_64.AppImage
./Tubefast-x86_64.AppImage

Installed, with a menu entry

Download tubefast-linux-x64.tar.gz and run its installer. It puts Tubefast in ~/.local/bin and adds it to your app menu. install.sh --uninstall removes it again.

tar -xzf tubefast-linux-x64.tar.gz
tubefast/install.sh

Check what you downloaded

Every release is built by GitHub from the public source. You can confirm that your download is one of them:

gh attestation verify tubefast-windows-x64.zip --repo yigitbozyaka/tubefast

Use the name of the file you downloaded. Each release also lists the SHA-256 of every download in SHA256SUMS.txt.

Build it yourself

You need Rust 1.90 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/yigitbozyaka/tubefast
cd tubefast
cargo run --release

Good to know

Credit

Tubefast exists because of Spotifast by @crmne. Spotifast showed that a streaming client can be a small native app instead of a browser in disguise. Tubefast takes the same idea and the same choices (Rust, egui, no browser engine) and applies them to YouTube Music. If you use Spotify, go and star it.

Client parameters are kept in step with the research done by the yt-dlp project. Icons are Phosphor. Typefaces are Onest and Big Shoulders Display.