Questions

Yes. Nixie plays without advertisements, in the background, and through its own audio engine, and those are the things YouTube sells a subscription for. It checks when you link an account and refuses one that does not hold a subscription.

Nixie is not a way to get Premium features without Premium, and it is not affiliated with or authorized by YouTube.

No. Nixie is an independent, unofficial client, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google or YouTube. It is not a YouTube Music product, it does not copy or imitate one, and nothing here speaks for Google. YouTube and YouTube Music are trademarks of Google LLC, used here only to say what Nixie connects to.

Nothing. Nixie is free and MIT licensed, with no paid tier and no premium build. Nothing in the app asks for money and nothing is kept behind a donation. A donation supports the people who build Nixie and buys no feature and no priority.

macOS, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, with a build for each. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. Linux, 64-bit, as an AppImage that needs no libfuse2 on Ubuntu 24.04 and later. Every build updates itself.

There is no arm64 build for Windows or Linux, and no deb, rpm, Homebrew or winget package. The install notes cover each platform in detail.

On macOS, no. Every release is signed and notarized by Apple, the disk image as well as the app inside it, so it opens on a double click with no right-click trick and no Gatekeeper warning at either step.

On Windows, once. The installer is not signed, because a code signing certificate is an annual bill this project does not have, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC" on first run. Choose More info, then Run anyway. That warning is about the absence of a certificate, not about anything found in the file. If you did not download it from the releases page, check the file against it.

On Linux, no. Mark the AppImage executable and run it.

Nixie speaks English and Italian. It opens in your system's language and you can change it in Settings, and YouTube Music's own shelves and genres follow the same choice.

No. Nixie is beta software. Things move, and some of them break. Bug reports are welcome.

Because there is no other way in. Google refuses sign-in from an embedded browser window, and refuses OAuth tokens on the endpoints this app talks to. So Nixie does not ask for your password at all: it adopts the session from a browser you are already signed in to on the same machine.

There is no password field and no way to paste a session by hand.

Firefox on every platform. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Chromium on macOS and Linux. On Windows, those same browsers as long as their cookie store still uses the older encryption scheme, which today means Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Chromium. You pick which profile.

On macOS the first read can ask for your Keychain password, and recent versions of macOS refuse it until you give Nixie Full Disk Access in System Settings, under Privacy & Security. Nixie shows you the way there when that happens.

Chrome on Windows, from version 127, is the exception: it needs the Nixie Link extension. On Linux, a browser installed as a snap or flatpak is out of reach for both paths, so install it from its vendor's repository instead. The full table is on GitHub.

A small browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Chromium. Chrome on Windows protects its cookies so that only Chrome can read them, and Nixie will not impersonate Chrome to get at them. So the extension asks Chrome for the YouTube cookies through the official extension API and hands them to Nixie on the same computer, encrypted, and only when Nixie asks.

You need it for Chrome on Windows, and for any other Chromium browser on Windows once it adopts the same protection. Everywhere else it is optional, and Firefox never needs it. It is not on any store: you load it unpacked from the release zip, following its README. More in the extension section.

Into a dedicated Electron session partition, and nowhere else. They are never logged, never sent anywhere except YouTube, and never exposed to the app's interface.

Google expires the session every few minutes and only the browser holds the current value, so Nixie re-reads that profile while it runs, at most once a minute, for as long as the account stays linked. Signing out clears the session and the parser cache.

Nixie reaches YouTube through the private interface the YouTube Music apps use, which Google does not publish or support. Nothing about you leaves your device to anyone else, but the account you link is talking to YouTube through an unofficial client, and it carries whatever risk that brings.

It brings every track to a target you choose: -19, -14 or -11 LUFS, or off. Nixie reads the integrated loudness YouTube already measured for each stream, so there is no analysis pass and no delay before a track starts. Loud tracks are pulled all the way down. Quiet ones are lifted, but never by more than 6 dB, because YouTube publishes a loudness and not a true peak, and a quiet master already peaking near full scale would clip if it were lifted blind.

Nixie asks LRCLIB, then NetEase, then YouTube Music itself, and prefers a time-synced result over a plain one whichever source it came from. When a track genuinely has none, it says so, and marks a track with no words at all as instrumental rather than leaving you wondering.

Yes. Shows and episodes play like any other track, your library has a Podcasts tab, and new episodes from the shows you follow collect in their own playlist. Episodes have no lyrics, likes or radio.

The app checks for them when it starts and every six hours while it runs, downloads them in the background, and asks nothing of you beyond a restart. If you never restart, the update installs the next time you quit. On Linux this works when Nixie runs as the AppImage, which is the ordinary way to run it.

No. There is no Nixie account, no backend, no telemetry, no analytics and no crash uploader. What does leave the machine goes to YouTube: the session, and each play you start, which lands in your watch history just as it would in YouTube Music. One switch in Settings stops the play reports.

The privacy document lists exactly what is stored and what leaves the machine.

Settings has an error report you can read before you share it, even before you sign in. It holds operation names, error categories and versions, never cookies, account names, URLs or lyrics. Nixie never sends it by itself: reporting an issue copies it and opens a GitHub draft that you submit yourself. Or open an issue directly.

Yes. All of it, under the MIT license. Every build also ships the full license text of every open source package inside it, readable in Settings under About.