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The first-run wizard dismissed itself as a step in its own flow, so a library appearing by any other route left a full-screen modal up over an app that was already set up — intercepting every pointer event, which is also what keeps Settings out of reach while it is there. AddLibrary emits LibraryAdded whoever calls it, so one subscription makes the dismissal follow the state the wizard exists to wait for rather than the button being pressed. It is registered before the initial read, or a library arriving while that call is in flight is answered with a stale empty list; both routes out now end in one dismiss(), which sets `finished` before asking the dialog to close because preventClose cancels the hide otherwise. Closes #175
YellowJacket
Music how it was meant to bee.
YellowJacket plays the music you already own. Point it at your folders and it scans them, reads the tags and the cover art, and gives you a library you can browse, search, queue and tidy up — on your own machine, with no account, no streaming service and no telemetry.
It plays MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis and WAV, on Linux and Android, and builds from source on macOS.
What it does
Plays your files. Play, pause, seek and volume with a mute toggle; a read-ahead buffer so seeking is instant rather than gappy; a queue you can add to, reorder and shuffle, with play-next; shuffle and repeat (off / all / one). It remembers the track, the position and the queue between sessions, and it answers your desktop's media keys — MPRIS on Linux, a media notification and lock-screen controls on Android.
Keeps the library tidy. It scans the folders you give it and rescans only what changed, so a big library costs its full scan once. It de-duplicates embedded cover art rather than storing the same image a hundred times, notices files that have gone away, and spots duplicate tracks. Browse by album, artist or genre, search across everything, mark favourites, and see what you have been playing.
Playlists, and playlists that write themselves. Drag tracks in and reorder them, or describe what you want — genre, play count, how long since you played it — and let a smart playlist keep itself up to date.
Explore and auto-tag, from the MusicBrainz catalog. Explore browses artists, releases and genres from the catalog rather than only from what you own, so an album page can tell you that you have nine of its twelve tracks. Auto-tag matches your files against MusicBrainz and fills in the metadata that is missing, with a review step before anything is written to disk. Lyrics search finds a track from a line you remember.
Explore needs its catalog, which is a one-off ~0.6 GB download from Settings → Search Index. It asks first on a metered connection, and everything else in the app works without it.
Install
Every download comes from the releases page.
Linux
Download yellowjacket-<version>-linux-amd64.tar.gz from the latest release and
unpack it. It holds the binary, a .desktop entry and an icon.
On Arch, install it from the package registry instead and get updates with
the rest of your system — the one-time key import and pacman.conf block are in
packaging/arch/README.md:
sudo pacman -Sy yellowjacket
Android
Install the APK from the release page, or from the URL below, which always points at the newest build:
https://git.ljones.me/api/packages/yonlu/generic/yellowjacket-android/latest/yellowjacket.apk
That URL needs no credentials, so Obtainium can
poll it directly and keep the app up to date. The build is arm64-v8a only, and
docs/android-release.md says why.
macOS
Homebrew builds it from source on your own Mac — there is no prebuilt .app,
because a signed macOS bundle needs a macOS machine to produce it and the
release runner is a Linux container.
brew install shadow-puppet/yellowjacket/yellowjacket
See packaging/homebrew/README.md.
Windows
Not published. It cross-compiles cleanly, but no Windows build of this app has
ever been run, and nothing here can exercise one — so shipping it would be a
promise that cannot be kept. You can still build it yourself: see
CONTRIBUTING.md.
Coming from a 1.x install?
Versions restarted at 0.0.1 when releases became automatic, which every package manager reads as a downgrade. It costs one reinstall, once — the details are with each channel: Homebrew, Android.
First run
- Launch YellowJacket.
- Add the folder your music lives in — the first-run wizard asks, and Settings → Libraries is where you add more later.
- Watch the scan finish. It reports progress, and you can browse while it runs.
- Queue something and press play.
Your library and settings stay on your machine:
| Linux / macOS | Windows | |
|---|---|---|
| Config | ~/.config/yellowjacket/ |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\yellowjacket\config |
| Library data | ~/.local/share/yellowjacket/ |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\yellowjacket\data |
Setting YJ_HOME moves both, which is how you keep a second library separate.
More screenshots
An album page knows what you own, and says so:
The home page suggests somewhere to start rather than opening on a wall of everything:
Contributing, and the rest of the documentation
CONTRIBUTING.md— build it from source, run the tests, and how a change gets in.CLAUDE.md— the deep reference: the architecture and the reasons behind the shape of it.- The issue tracker is what is wanted and what is being worked on; #73 is the roadmap.
- Releases double as the changelog — every one is generated from the commits it contains.