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 person writing it and buys no feature and no priority.

Apple silicon and Intel Macs, with a signed and notarized build for each. Windows and Linux are planned but have no date attached, follow along on GitHub.

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.

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.

Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or Chromium on macOS, and Firefox on any platform. You pick which profile.

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.

The app checks for them itself, 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.

No. There is no account, no backend, no telemetry, no analytics and no crash uploader. Everything Nixie knows stays on your computer. The privacy document lists exactly what is stored and what leaves the machine.

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.