featherplay
A free, native Windows player for YouTube Music, light enough to forget it's running.
A working demo of featherplay's window, playing short clips of six songs under free licences. You can play and pause, skip, like a song or mark it not for you, open the lyrics and click a line to jump to it, scroll the lyrics, search, browse the sidebar's pages, open Up next and Related, and minimise the window to the tray.
Pick up where you left off
California Lullabye
Josh Woodward
Made for the demo
Library
Liked songs
Songs you like show up here. Press the heart in the bar.
Playlists
Explore
New for the demo
Moods
History
Today
Songs
No songs match that. Try a title, an artist or a song link.
California Lullabye
Not for meSkips the song and marks it as one you dislikeJosh Woodward
Playing from Made for the demo
No lyrics for this song
- Lyrics: Josh Woodward, CC BY 4.0
Memory in use, minimised and playing
- featherplay 81 MB
- Pear Desktop 798 MB
- YouTube Music in Edge 988 MB
Private memory, all processes, the same song. Measured on 1 November 2026.
Music: “California Lullabye” by Josh Woodward,
Light, and it shows
Measured on one Windows PC on 1 November 2026, the same song in all three. Lower is better on every bar.
Memory while playing
Private memory of all its processes, window minimised.
- featherplay 81 MB
- Pear Desktop 798 MB
- YouTube Music in Edge 988 MB
About 10 times less than Pear Desktop and 12 times less than Edge.
Memory while paused
The same, with the song paused.
- featherplay 80 MB
- Pear Desktop 782 MB
- YouTube Music in Edge 973 MB
About 10 times less than Pear Desktop and 12 times less than Edge.
CPU while playing
Share of the whole processor, window minimised.
- featherplay 0.022%
- Pear Desktop 0.17%
- YouTube Music in Edge 0.14%
About 8 times less than Pear Desktop and 6 times less than Edge.
CPU while paused
The same, with the song paused.
- featherplay 0.005%
- Pear Desktop 0.05%
- YouTube Music in Edge 0.018%
About 10 times less than Pear Desktop and 4 times less than Edge.
Processes
How many it runs at once, fewest to most seen. All are counted above.
- featherplay 1
- Pear Desktop 6 to 7
- YouTube Music in Edge 9 to 11
Download
What you download to install it. Edge comes with Windows.
- featherplay 10.13 MB
- Pear Desktop 274 MB
- YouTube Music in Edge None
About 27 times smaller than Pear Desktop's installer.
What featherplay leaves out
Two folders, as Windows shows them: Pear Desktop 3.12 once it's installed, and featherplay, one program, installed or portable. This is the portable exe; installed, it sits next to its uninstaller.
- locales 55 files
- resources 31 files
- chrome_100_percent.pak 118 KB
- chrome_200_percent.pak 193 KB
- d3dcompiler_47.dll 4,631 KB
- dxcompiler.dll 25,034 KB
- dxil.dll 1,475 KB
- ffmpeg.dll 2,986 KB
- icudtl.dat 10,622 KB
- libEGL.dll 467 KB
- libGLESv2.dll 7,811 KB
- LICENSE.electron.txt 2 KB
- LICENSES.chromium.html 19,890 KB
- resources.pak 6,716 KB
- snapshot_blob.bin 339 KB
- Uninstall YouTube Music.exe 159 KB
- v8_context_snapshot.bin 705 KB
- vk_swiftshader.dll 5,391 KB
- vk_swiftshader_icd.json 1 KB
- vulkan-1.dll 904 KB
- YouTube Music.exe 226,906 KB
105 files, 396 MB
- featherplay.exe 28,881 KB
1 file, 28.20 MB
Pear Desktop, installed 396 MB
featherplay, installed about 32 MB
featherplay, portable exe 28.20 MB
12 times smaller, installed.
Installed means the exe plus its uninstaller, about 4.2 MB.
Not in featherplay's folder. Point at one to find it in Pear's.
-
No browser engine in the window. Signing in opens Windows' own WebView2 once, then closes it.
locales folder, dxcompiler.dll and 11 more: 123 MB of Pear's folder
-
One native program, written in Rust and drawn with Slint, instead of a web app in a frame.
YouTube Music.exe, resources folder and 1 more: 263 MB of Pear's folder
-
It never plays video. A music video with a song version plays as the song.
vk_swiftshader.dll, ffmpeg.dll and 2 more: 9.1 MB of Pear's folder
- Telemetry
No analytics and no tracking, and no server of its own.
Listed on the measuring PC on 1 November 2026, sizes as Explorer shows them.
Lyrics, up close
Synced lines that follow the song, in its cover's colour. Click a line to jump there. Off, and featherplay never looks lyrics up at all.
California Lullabye
Josh Woodward
0:20 of 0:54
Music: joshwoodward.com,
No lyrics for this song
Lyrics are off. featherplay won't look them up until you turn Show lyrics back on.
Lyrics: Josh Woodward, CC BY 4.0
Make it yours
featherplay comes in dark and light, and takes its accent from the cover that's playing. Try both on the window here, and pick a song to see its colour.
A working demo of featherplay's window, playing short clips of six songs under free licences. You can play and pause, skip, like a song or mark it not for you, open the lyrics and click a line to jump to it, scroll the lyrics, search, browse the sidebar's pages, open Up next and Related, and minimise the window to the tray.
Pick up where you left off
California Lullabye
Josh Woodward
Made for the demo
Library
Liked songs
Songs you like show up here. Press the heart in the bar.
Playlists
Explore
New for the demo
Moods
History
Today
Songs
No songs match that. Try a title, an artist or a song link.
California Lullabye
Not for meSkips the song and marks it as one you dislikeJosh Woodward
Playing from Made for the demo
No lyrics for this song
- Lyrics: Josh Woodward, CC BY 4.0
Music: “California Lullabye” by Josh Woodward,
Everything you'd miss, kept
Built in and ready from the first run. Nothing to add.
A working demo of featherplay's window, playing short clips of six songs under free licences. You can play and pause, skip, like a song or mark it not for you, open the lyrics and click a line to jump to it, scroll the lyrics, search, browse the sidebar's pages, open Up next and Related, and minimise the window to the tray.
Pick up where you left off
California Lullabye
Josh Woodward
Made for the demo
Library
Liked songs
Songs you like show up here. Press the heart in the bar.
Playlists
Explore
New for the demo
Moods
History
Today
Songs
No songs match that. Try a title, an artist or a song link.
California Lullabye
Not for meSkips the song and marks it as one you dislikeJosh Woodward
Playing from Made for the demo
No lyrics for this song
- Lyrics: Josh Woodward, CC BY 4.0
Listening to featherplay
California Lullabye
by Josh Woodward
0:20 elapsed
featherplay
California Lullabye
Josh Woodward
Coming from Pear Desktop? See what carries over.
Questions
Something else? Ask on GitHub.
Is featherplay official?
No. featherplay is an independent, unofficial player for YouTube Music. It isn't made by Google or YouTube and isn't affiliated with them.
Because it's unofficial, a change on YouTube's side can break playback until featherplay is updated. If something stops working, update first.
How does signing in work?
featherplay opens a small sign-in window, Microsoft Edge WebView2, with Google's own sign-in page. You sign in there as you would in a browser, and featherplay never sees your password. Once you're in, it keeps the YouTube Music session from that window and closes it. The main window never contains a browser.
The session is kept in Windows Credential Manager, never in a file. It gives the same access to your account as a signed-in browser, so treat it like a password; Sign out in Settings removes it. Windows 11 includes WebView2, and most Windows 10 PCs have it with Edge.
Is my account safe with it?
Your YouTube Music session, your Last.fm session and your ListenBrainz token stay on your PC, in Windows Credential Manager. The code is public for anyone to read.
It is still an unofficial client, using YouTube Music in a way Google doesn't support. If that worries you, sign in with a second account.
What does it connect to?
featherplay sends no telemetry and has no server of its own. It connects to YouTube Music and Google for your music, covers, streams and sign-in, and to GitHub to fetch yt-dlp and Deno on the first run and to update yt-dlp.
LRCLIB gets the song's title, artist, album and length, only while lyrics are on screen. SponsorBlock, on by default, is asked only about music videos and uploads (songs have nothing to skip), by the first four characters of a hash of the video's ID, so it doesn't learn which video you play.
Last.fm and ListenBrainz hear from it only if you connect them, and Discord only if you turn on the status, through the Discord app on your own PC.
Does it download anything else?
Yes, two helpers, on the first run: yt-dlp, which finds each song's audio stream, and Deno, which yt-dlp needs to do it. featherplay fetches both from their GitHub releases and checks each file against a SHA256 written into its own code; a file that doesn't match is deleted, not run.
After that it updates yt-dlp at most once a day, because YouTube changes often. Nothing else is downloaded, and never the music itself.
How do I uninstall it?
Installed: uninstall it from Settings > Apps. That removes everything featherplay keeps: settings, cache, the helpers, the sign-in window's data and its entries in Credential Manager.
Portable: sign out and disconnect Last.fm in Settings first, which clears both from Credential Manager. Then delete the exe and its two folders, %APPDATA%\featherplay and %LOCALAPPDATA%\featherplay.
Why only Windows?
featherplay is built on Windows' own parts: the media overlay, the taskbar buttons, the notification area and Credential Manager. That's a lot of what keeps it light. There's no macOS or Linux version.
Is it free?
Yes. It's free and open source under the MIT licence, with no paid tier and no account to create.
How do I report a bug?
Open an issue on GitHub. Say what you did, what you expected and what happened, and add the version from Settings, About.
Download for Windows
Before you run it
"Windows protected your PC"
featherplay isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you once. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Where it keeps things
Settings in %APPDATA%\, the cache in %LOCALAPPDATA%\, your
sign-in in Credential Manager. The uninstaller removes them all; with the exe, delete them and it's gone.
Free and unofficial. Not made by or affiliated with Google or YouTube. All releases and checksums on GitHub