tunetape

Stream music from YouTube, Spotify and KHInsider, right inside your terminal.
_{Paste a link. Press Enter. Listen. No browser, no tabs, no ads.}

Install · How it works · Screens · Keys · Wiki

What is tunetape?

tunetape is a small audio player that lives in your terminal. It hands the stream to mpv (audio only) and wraps it in a btop-style interface you can drive with the keyboard or the mouse. Nothing is downloaded or stored; it just plays.

• Three sources. YouTube videos and playlists, Spotify tracks and playlists, and KHInsider video game soundtracks. Paste any link and the source is detected as you type.
• A player full of live data. Live L/R levels with a loudness graph, plus the stream's codec, bitrate, sample rate, cache and download speed, all next to the track and its controls.
• Playlists and albums. Next and previous, auto-advance, and a queue you can jump around in.
• Recently played. Everything you play is remembered, and playlists resume at the track you left off.
• Discover with AI. Describe a vibe ("calm piano for focus") and get a list of real songs to play. Bring your own API key; the feature stays off until you add one.
• Sounds even. Optional loudness normalization keeps volume consistent across sources, and your last volume is remembered.
• Themes. More than twenty color themes with a live preview.
• Fits any terminal. macOS, Linux and Windows, down to 60 columns.

Install

You need two tools on your machine, mpv and yt-dlp, plus tunetape itself. Pick your OS:

macOS

One command via Homebrew. It brings in Python, mpv and yt-dlp for you:

brew install oauramos/tunetape/tunetape

Windows

winget install shinchiro.mpv
winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp
pip install git+https://github.com/oauramos/tunetape.git

Linux

sudo apt install mpv yt-dlp        # or your distro's package manager
pip install git+https://github.com/oauramos/tunetape.git

Run it

tunetape

That's it. Press 1, paste a link, and press Enter.

Want another way in? The install script, manual install, uv/pipx, upgrading and uninstalling are all covered in the wiki: Installation.

How it works

1. Paste a link

Press 1 on the main menu and paste a YouTube, Spotify or KHInsider URL. tunetape tells you which source it found before you press Enter.

2. It loads

While the stream is fetched, a small box lists each step and how long it took.

3. It plays

The player is a dashboard:

• now playing: the track, a progress bar (click it to seek), the controls and a volume gauge.
• level: live left and right levels with peak ticks, and a scrolling loudness graph.
• stream: the codec, bitrate, sample rate, cache ahead and download speed.

Long titles scroll across like a car radio display.

4. Playlists just work

Spotify playlists, YouTube playlists and KHInsider albums show the track position and add n / p for next and previous. Tracks advance on their own. On a wide terminal the queue sits alongside: press tab to move into it and Enter to jump to any track.

Screens

Recently played

Jump back into anything you have played. Playlists and albums resume where you stopped.

Discover (AI)

Type what you feel like hearing and pick a song from the suggestions. Each one streams from YouTube.

Settings

Toggle loudness normalization, pick a theme, and set up AI discovery.

Themes

Move through the list and the whole interface recolors as you go. Enter keeps the theme you're on; Esc puts the old one back. You can also switch themes from anywhere with ctrl+p.

Small terminals

Every screen adapts down to 60 columns. The welcome tuna shrinks to a pixel-art version, and below 96 columns the player's buttons keep just their keys.

Keys

The same keys work on every screen, and each screen's row of buttons ends with the same h help, b back and q quit. Buttons can be clicked too.

On screens with a text box, b, q and h type letters, so use esc to go back and ctrl+c to quit.

In the player:

The full reference is in the wiki: Usage and Controls.

Learn more

The wiki has the details this page leaves out:

• Installation: every install method, upgrading, uninstalling
• Usage and Controls: each screen and every key
• Sources: what links work and how each source is streamed
• AI Discovery: Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible endpoints and local models
• Settings: normalization, themes, where your data lives
• Troubleshooting: playback stalls, missing tools, the Debug screen
• FAQ

Built with

• mpv, the media player doing the actual playback (its audio filters also feed the level meter)
• yt-dlp, which resolves YouTube streams
• Textual, which draws the terminal UI

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Disclaimer

tunetape does not store, host, download, or redistribute any content from YouTube, Spotify, KHInsider, or any other third-party service. It is a lightweight terminal-based streaming client that relies on publicly available tools (mpv, yt-dlp) to stream audio in real time. For Spotify, only public metadata (track names and artists) is read to locate the matching audio on YouTube; no Spotify audio is accessed.