Recently I started working on a small new project, AudioTube. It is a client for YouTube Music made with Kirigami that works equally well on mobile devices and desktops.
Many of us use streaming services nowadays to find new music. For those of us who are using a Pine Phone, there are no official apps for this purpose available. AudioTube is supposed to bridge that gap.
I chose YouTube Music as the provider, because it has a large collection that can be used without a paid account. The quality is good enough, and the client library situation is also good. For everything but the playback, AudioTube uses a python library called ytmusicapi, and for finding the streaming urls, it makes use of the popular youtube-dl.
Right now, AudioTube can search YouTube Music, list albums and artists, play automatically generated playlists, albums and allows to put your own playlist together.
ytmusicapi allows for more, there are a few more methods that could be used for e.g automatic artist mixes.
If you want to try it out, you can find the code on KDE’s GitLab, invent. In addition to the common dependencies of Qt and Kirigami, it requires the ytmusicapi and youtube_dl python packages, which you can install using pip if they are not packaged in your distro.
Keep in mind AudioTube is still in an early state of development. Next I will look into implementing better error handling. Of course I am always happy about merge requests :)
So far there is one known issue left:
On Manjaro, Python always tries to encode / decode as ascii, which makes the app crash with some data. I can’t say yet whether it affects other distros too, but it doesn’t happen on my debian testing install.
As a workaround, setting LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 helps.