YellowJacket

Music how it was meant to bee.

YellowJacket is a fast, cross-platform desktop music player for your local collection. It plays your files, keeps your library tidy, and helps you discover and organize your music — all in a clean, responsive interface. No accounts, no streaming, no telemetry: just your music on your machine.

Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Features

Play your music

• Plays MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and WAV
• Play, pause, seek, and volume control with a mute toggle
• Gapless, glitch-free seeking backed by a read-ahead buffer
• A queue you can add to, reorder, and shuffle, with play-next support
• Shuffle and repeat (off / all / one)
• Picks up right where you left off — remembers your track, position, and volume between sessions
• Media-key and MPRIS support on Linux, so your desktop's playback controls just work

Keep your library organized

• Point it at your music folders and it scans them automatically
• Reads tags and embedded cover art, and de-duplicates artwork so it isn't stored twice
• Incremental sync — only new or changed files get reprocessed, and deleted files are cleaned up
• Browse by album, artist, or genre, or search across everything
• Mark favorites and see what you've been listening to with play history
• Edit track tags directly when something's off

Playlists

• Create playlists, drag tracks in, and reorder them
• Smart playlists that build themselves from rules (by genre, rating, play count, and more)
• Pin a default playlist and spot duplicate tracks at a glance

Discover and clean up (powered by MusicBrainz)

• Explore — browse artists, releases, and genres from the MusicBrainz catalog, not just what's already in your library
• Auto-tag — match your files against MusicBrainz to fill in correct artist, album, and track metadata, with a review step before anything is written
• Lyrics search — find a track by a line you remember

Install

Download the latest build for your platform from the releases page.

Platform	Download
Linux	yellowjacket-linux-amd64
macOS	yellowjacket-darwin-universal.app.zip (Apple Silicon + Intel)
Windows	yellowjacket-windows-amd64.exe

Prefer to build it yourself? See Building from source.

Getting started

1. Launch YellowJacket.
2. Open Settings and add the folder(s) where your music lives.
3. Let the initial scan finish — you'll see progress as it works.
4. Browse by album, artist, or genre, queue something up, and press play.

Your library and settings are stored locally:

	Linux / macOS	Windows
Config	~/.config/yellowjacket/	%LOCALAPPDATA%\yellowjacket\config
Library data	~/.local/share/yellowjacket/	%LOCALAPPDATA%\yellowjacket\data

Building from source

YellowJacket is built with Go and a Lit/TypeScript frontend, bridged by the Wails framework.

Prerequisites

Tool	Version
Go	1.25+
Node.js	22+
pnpm	10+
Wails CLI	v3 — vendored, no install needed (go tool wails3)

The Wails v3 CLI resolves from the tool block in go.mod, so there is nothing to install globally; make setup fetches it with the rest of the tooling.

On Linux, install the system libraries Wails needs. v3 builds against GTK4 + WebKitGTK 6.0 by default:

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev libgtk-4-dev libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev   # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S alsa-lib gtk4 webkitgtk-6.0                              # Arch

A machine without webkitgtk-6.0 can still build with -tags gtk3 against the older WebKit2GTK 4.1 stack, but that is an escape hatch, not what CI or a release builds.

macOS and Windows need no extra system packages. Run go tool wails3 doctor to check your environment.

Build

make setup        # install tooling and git hooks
make dev          # run with hot-reload
make build-prod   # produce a release binary

More detail for contributors lives in CLAUDE.md — the architecture, the conventions and the reasons behind them. What is being worked on is the issue tracker; #73 is the roadmap.