tidalt

tidalt is a Tidal music player for Linux that delivers bit-perfect, lossless audio directly to your DAC — no PipeWire, no PulseAudio, no resampling. (A small number of USB interfaces expose a fixed native format and cannot be driven this way; see fixed-format audio interfaces.)

It is built on top of the Tidal API and can run in three ways:

• Interactive TUI — browse, search, and control playback from the terminal
• Daemon — headless background process, controlled via the TUI or any MPRIS2 client
• Client — lightweight TUI that forwards commands to a running daemon over D-Bus

All three modes share the same playback engine. The daemon holds exclusive access to the audio device only while a track is actually playing — releasing it on pause so other applications can use it freely.

100% vibe coded with Claude and Gemini.

Linux only. Requires a Tidal HiFi or HiFi Plus subscription.

Pre-built packages are available on the releases page. The official Docker image is available at benehiko/tidalt — see docs/docker.md for usage.

sudo pacman -U tidalt-*.pkg.tar.zst

sudo dpkg -i tidalt_*.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

sudo dnf install tidalt-*.rpm

All packages (Arch, Debian, Fedora — amd64 and arm64) can be built locally with a single command using Docker Buildx bake:

# One-time: create a multi-platform builder
docker buildx create --use

# Build all packages (replace VERSION as needed)
docker buildx bake \
  --file docker-bake.hcl \
  --set "*.args.VERSION=3.0.0" \
  --set "*.output=type=local,dest=dist"

Artifacts land in dist/:

dist/
  tidalt-3.0.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst   # Arch
  tidalt_3.0.0-1_amd64.deb            # Debian / Ubuntu (amd64)
  tidalt_3.0.0-1_arm64.deb            # Debian / Ubuntu (arm64)
  tidalt-3.0.0-1.fc43.x86_64.rpm      # Fedora (amd64)
  tidalt-3.0.0-1.fc43.aarch64.rpm     # Fedora (arm64)

To build a single target: append debian, arch, or fedora to the command.

See docs/installation.md for building packages locally without Docker or installing from source.

Register the tidal:// URL handler so clicking "Open in desktop app" on tidal.com opens the track directly in tidalt:

tidalt setup

Optionally install tidalt as a systemd user service (starts at login, no terminal window):

tidalt setup --daemon

On first launch you will be prompted to log in via the Tidal OAuth2 device flow. Your session is saved to the system keychain (or an age-encrypted file at ~/.config/tidalt/secrets) and reused on subsequent runs.

• Sidebar navigation — a persistent left nav groups every section: Queue (with the hovered track's cover art), Playlists, Favorite Songs / Artists / Albums, Recently Played, Daily Mixes, Search, and Themes
• Contextual action sheet (o) — from any track, open a popup of actions: play now, play next, add to queue, add to playlist, start radio, go to artist/album, favorite, copy link
• Command palette (: or Ctrl+P) — fuzzy-run any action or jump to any section
• Hybrid queue / playlist model — the queue is your live workspace; opening a saved playlist loads it and tracks its origin. The header shows synced, edited — S save, or radio · unsaved — S save, and S saves the queue as a new playlist. Edits never silently change a saved playlist
• First-class favorites — browse favorite songs, artists, and albums as their own sections
• Grouped search — results are split into Songs / Artists / Albums; drill into an artist or album from any hit
• Import from Spotify — paste a Spotify track or playlist URL (command palette → "Import from Spotify…") and tidalt finds each song on Tidal, flagging anything it can't match as not available; then create a Tidal playlist or load the matches into the queue. No Spotify login required. See docs/spotify-import.md
• In-app theme picker — eight built-in color schemes (TIDALT, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Nord, Rosé Pine, Dracula, Amber CRT) plus an "Auto — match terminal" option, with live preview as you move the cursor; the choice is persisted
• Artist view — browse an artist's full discography and play everything, their top tracks, or a single album
• Song radio — build a queue of similar tracks for any song
• Shuffle (Fisher-Yates pre-shuffle or random pick)
• Bit-perfect FLAC playback via direct ALSA hw: — bypasses PipeWire/PulseAudio entirely (see fixed-format devices)
• Auto-negotiates the best PCM format your DAC supports
• Auto-advances through the queue; respects shuffle mode
• Volume control and output device selection, both persisted between sessions
• Session and playback position restored on next launch
• MPRIS2 registration — media keys and playerctl work without TUI focus
• Daemon mode — run headless in the background, control via TUI client or playerctl

See docs/ui.md for a full tour of the interface.

The interface has two focus zones: the sidebar (section navigation) and the main pane (the selected section's content). h / l move focus between them.

Daemon mode required. These shortcuts only work when tidalt is running as a background daemon (via tidalt setup --daemon / systemd). A plain tidalt TUI session does not register a persistent MPRIS2 service, so media keys and playerctl will have no effect when the TUI is closed.

When the daemon is running, tidalt registers as an MPRIS2 media player so playback can be controlled from any MPRIS2 client — playerctl, KDE Connect, your desktop environment's media key handler — without a TUI open.

Many keyboards and desktop environments map dedicated media keys directly to MPRIS2:

These are handled by your desktop environment via MPRIS2 — tidalt does not implement any special key capture itself.

On keyboards without dedicated media keys, bind playerctl to custom shortcuts via your desktop environment:

See docs/media-keys.md for full setup instructions.

Auto-detection scans /proc/asound/cards. Any ALSA-visible device can be selected manually with the d key.

Most DACs let tidalt negotiate the stream's native shape on the hw: endpoint, which is what makes bit-perfect output possible. A few USB audio interfaces — Focusrite's Vocaster line, for example — instead expose a fixed native channel count, sample rate, and format, and reject anything else outright.

When tidalt detects that refusal it reopens the device through ALSA's plug layer (plughw:), which resamples and remixes to whatever the hardware accepts. Playback works, but the output is no longer bit-perfect. The now-playing bar makes this visible: the device readout shows the plughw: device actually in use, and the quality badge is marked (converted).

This fallback only engages on a genuine format refusal. Transient failures — such as PipeWire not having finished releasing the device — are retried against hw: as before, so a device that can do bit-perfect output is never silently downgraded.

• Installation (packages, source, post-install setup)
• Running in Docker
• Architecture & audio pipeline
• Development (building, linting, git hooks)
• Client-server architecture & daemon mode
• MPRIS2 support
• Importing from Spotify
• DAC compatibility
• Media keys & MPRIS2 setup
• Browser URL handler troubleshooting
• Debugging