Three things on the Explore surfaces, all about not asking twice. A portrait already on disk costs no network call. explore-view seeded only from the library store — owned artists, which on a catalog search is nearly none of the results — and sent everything else to GetArtistImageURL, the resolving entry point, one await at a time. GetArtistImagesCachedPaths asks the disk about every unresolved artist in one call, and only what it does not answer reaches the resolver, in parallel. The artist page's two sections both wanted PrefetchReleases and each called it, so the most expensive call the app makes was issued twice for an overlapping set on a 1 req/s limiter. They are collected and sent once on a microtask, and prefetchRequested stops the cold-artist refetch re-asking for what it already asked for. The release cards — most of the artist page — had no context menu at all. They have one now on both release shapes, normalised to a ReleaseMenuTarget when the menu opens so the union does not reach the action handlers. It is a discriminated union rather than one nullable field per kind because the panel is shared with the track menu: that is what keeps aria-label moving with the target, which is the fault cover-grid shipped. Which items appear is three different questions — playback is gated on a local album id, not on "owned", and the request needs a catalog MBID, so it is absent for a library-only release. Note on the docs: the CLAUDE.md and NOTES.md prose here was reconstructed after a mishandled `git stash --keep-index` destroyed the uncommitted originals. One NOTES.md section is marked as incomplete where its text could not be recovered. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UDCbcCZQepnpSQYJ6SxxZm
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
- Launch YellowJacket.
- Open Settings and add the folder(s) where your music lives.
- Let the initial scan finish — you'll see progress as it works.
- 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 | v2 (go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest) |
On Linux, install the system libraries Wails needs:
sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev
macOS and Windows need no extra system packages. Run wails 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
docs/dev/overview.md and CLAUDE.md.