Koda for Windows
A native music player for Windows, powered by YouTube Music.
Koda is a family of apps: one native app per operating system, each built with that platform's own design system. Koda for Android and Koda for iOS and macOS are its siblings; this repository is the Windows one - WinUI 3, Fluent, Mica, and the Windows shell's own surfaces.
No official YouTube API key, no ads in the app, and signing in to YouTube Music is optional.
Questions, bug reports and ideas are welcome in the Telegram community, shared with Koda for Android and the rest of the family.
Download
Get the latest release from the releases page. Both downloads are for Windows 11 on x64 and carry everything they need.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
Koda-<version>-win-x64.msi |
The installer. Double-click it: Koda lands in your own Programs folder with a Start menu entry. No administrator rights needed. Installing a newer version replaces the old one and keeps your library. |
Koda-<version>-win-x64-portable.zip |
Portable. Unzip anywhere and run Koda.exe. Nothing is installed or registered. |
The release is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may say the file is unrecognised: choose More info, then Run anyway. There is no MSIX yet - that format needs a signing certificate Windows already trusts.
What's in it
Listening
- Home: Your Mix, Quick picks, recently played, your top artists, charts and YouTube Music's own shelves.
- Search for songs, albums, artists and playlists, with recent searches, or paste a YouTube or YouTube Music link to open it.
- Album, artist, playlist and mood pages, each with its own hero and track list.
- Now Playing in the cover's own colours, with the queue beside it.
- Lyrics, word by word, from YouLyPlus, BetterLyrics and LRCLIB at once: the line being sung fills as it is sung, backing vocals sit under their line, a duet's second voice takes the right. Right-click a line to share it as an image.
- Crossfade of 1 to 12 seconds (repeat one included), gapless changes with it off, and volume normalization to YouTube's loudness target.
- The queue: shuffle, repeat, Play next, drag to reorder, and Autoplay that carries on with the radio of the last song.
- Sleep timer, and skip back and ahead by 5, 10, 15 or 30 seconds.
Your library
- Liked songs, saved albums, playlists and artists, and playlists of your own.
- Downloads: a song from its right-click menu, or a whole album or playlist, to play without a connection. Songs you play all the way through are kept too, under Ready Offline.
- History of every play by the day, and listening stats.
- Suggest less: keep a song or an artist out of Home, mixes, radio and autoplay.
- Back up and restore the whole library as one file, and import a Koda for Android backup.
Connected
- YouTube Music: sign in with Google to bring your liked songs, saved albums, playlists and artists to this PC, and keep them in step both ways. Plays heard for 15 seconds can go to the account's YouTube history. Signing out keeps the library here.
- Last.fm scrobbling, with your own API account and Last.fm's own approval page. Koda never sees your password, and plays made offline are sent later.
- Discord: show what you're playing on your profile, with the cover and a link to the song.
Windows
- Media keys and the Windows media card, the taskbar's progress and buttons, and a Jump List.
- Close to the tray and keep playing; a song notification while Koda is out of sight.
- A mini player that stays on top, a choice of audio output, open at login,
koda://links and the Windows share sheet. - Ctrl + and Ctrl - scale the window's content, and Ctrl 0 puts it back to 100%; the choice is remembered.
- Works from the keyboard and with a screen reader; follows the system theme, accent and Energy Saver.
See CHANGELOG.md for what changed in each release.
Where your data lives
Settings, library, downloads and the listening cache live in your per-user local app data,
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Koda. Lossless (FLAC) downloads get their own folder, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Koda\flac,
named after the song. Set KODA_DATA to keep them somewhere else, for example beside a portable
copy:
$env:KODA_DATA = 'D:\KodaData'
Last.fm and YouTube Music sign-ins are kept in the Windows Credential Manager on that PC, never in
the data folder or a backup. The account's name and what the library last saw on YouTube Music live
in account.json and account-mirror.json in the data folder.
Building from source
You need Windows 11 (22H2 or newer) and the .NET 10 SDK.
dotnet build src\Koda\Koda.csproj -p:Platform=x64
dotnet test tests\Koda.Core.Tests
The app is unpackaged and self-contained and runs straight from
src\Koda\bin\x64\Debug\net10.0-windows10.0.26100.0\Koda.exe.
The release artifacts - the portable zip, the MSI, and the MSIX when a signing certificate is
given - come from one script. The MSI is built with the WiX Toolset
(dotnet tool install --tool-path <path> wix --version 5.0.2), from installer/Koda.wxs.
.\scripts\build-release.ps1
.\scripts\build-release.ps1 -CertificateThumbprint <thumbprint>
Repository layout
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
src/Koda |
The WinUI 3 app: shell, pages, playback, lyrics, system integration. |
src/Koda.Core |
The engine: InnerTube client, parsers, audio transport and store, library, lyrics, downloads, Last.fm, Discord, and the YouTube Music account. |
tests/Koda.Core.Tests |
Offline tests, driven by recorded responses in Fixtures. |
installer |
The WiX project for the MSI. |
scripts |
The release build script. |
The engine talks to YouTube's InnerTube endpoints directly. Responses are recorded into fixtures and the parsers are written against those, so the test suite runs offline and needs no account.
Community
Join the Koda Telegram community for releases, help and feedback on every Koda, Windows and Android alike. Bugs can also go to the issue tracker.
License
GPL-3.0, like the rest of the family. See LICENSE.
Koda is an independent project and is not affiliated with Google, YouTube, Last.fm or Discord.
