How YTubic became Radif
I wanted YouTube Music on my Mac as an app, not a browser tab. In July I found YTubic, an open source YouTube Music client by George Shyshov, and started using it every day.
The first thing I fixed was the Mac login. Google's sign-in page didn't like the webview, so I made it look like Safari. That was July 8. The same day I made dead lyrics providers time out so the panel couldn't hang on "loading". I also stopped fast scrolls from showing blank rows.
Then I kept fixing whatever got in my way. Four months and about 200 commits later, it had drifted into its own Mac-only app.
What changed
- Lyrics come from YouTube Music first. They sync line by line in a fullscreen player with the album art behind them. If a song's timing is off, you can nudge it for that track.
- Songs you've played before start instantly from a local cache. Audio goes up to 271 kbps Opus when Deno is installed.
- There's a video mode with a quality picker, docked above the queue.
- It shows up in macOS Now Playing, casts to a Google TV, and can put the song title at the notch.
- One-click actions that delete something can be undone.
Why radif
A radif is the word that repeats at the end of every couplet in a ghazal. I write those, in Urdu and Hindi.
That also explains my favorite small fix. In 0.5.3, Urdu lyrics finally right-align the way they should.
Renaming without breaking anyone
The part I worried about most was people who already had YTubic installed.
When you rename a GitHub repo, GitHub redirects the old URLs, so the old update feed still resolves. I kept the bundle identifier, so settings, sign-in and the cache stay where they were, with no migration. The updater unpacks the new build into the existing app's path, so an old install at /Applications/YTubic.app quietly starts running Radif.
The one rule that came out of it: I can never create a new repo called YTubic under my account. It would kill the redirect.
Credit
Radif started as George Shyshov's YTubic, and upstream is still maintained. It ships on Windows, Linux and Mac. If you're not on a Mac, or you want the original, use that: https://github.com/NUber-dev/YTubic
Try it
It's free, GPL-3.0 and unofficial, and it needs YouTube Music Premium. It isn't signed yet, so the first launch needs "Open Anyway" in System Settings. Every build runs on GitHub Actions from the public source, and the Homebrew cask pins its checksum.
brew install --cask yuvrajangadsingh/tap/radif