Ticli

An unofficial terminal music player for TIDAL. Search, browse, queue, and play music — all from your terminal. Not affiliated with TIDAL.

Ticli connects directly to TIDAL's API using your premium account. No desktop app needed. Just authenticate, search, and play.

Works on macOS and Linux.

╭──────────────────────── Ticli ────────────────────────╮
│                                                        │
│  ▶ ♥ Arlo Parks - Sophie                               │
│     Super Sad Generation                               │
│     1:47 ━━━━━━━━●━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 3:28    │
│     Queue: 3/12  16/44.1 FLAC                          │
│     Next: Cola • Arlo Parks                            │
│                                                        │
│  [space] play/pause  [n/→] next  [←] prev             │
│  [s] search  [q] queue  [p] playlists                  │
│  [l] like  [r] radio  [t] mini  [m] more               │
│                                                        │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Features

• Search — Find tracks, albums, artists, and playlists
• Browse — Navigate album and playlist tracklists
• Queue — Manage your playback queue, reorder, remove tracks
• Playlists — Browse and play your saved playlists
• Likes — Toggle favorites on any track
• Radio — Generate a station from any track
• Mini mode — Condensed single-line display
• Session restore — Picks up where you left off
• Lossless & Hi-Res — Stream up to 24-bit/192kHz FLAC
• Downloads — Keep tracks in your own music folder, tagged
• Secure auth — OAuth tokens stored in your OS keychain

Install

Requires Python 3.10+ and mpv.

# macOS
brew install mpv
pip install tidal-cli

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install mpv python3-pip
pip install tidal-cli

For secure token storage in your OS keychain (recommended):

pip install "tidal-cli[keyring]"

Usage

ticli

On first run you'll get a URL to authorize with your TIDAL account. After that, your session is cached and you go straight to the player.

Quality

ticli --quality MAX     # FLAC, up to 24-bit/192 kHz
ticli --quality HIGH    # FLAC, 16-bit/44.1 kHz — the default
ticli --quality MEDIUM  # AAC 320 kbps
ticli --quality LOW     # AAC 96 kbps

The names follow TIDAL's own app. FLAC (HIGH and MAX) requires the PKCE sign-in: ticli --login-flow pkce, or press u on the settings page later. The old spellings LOSSLESS and HIRES still work as aliases.

Keybindings

Player

Search

Queue

How it works

Ticli uses tidalapi to authenticate and fetch audio stream URLs. Audio is played through mpv. The TUI is built with Rich.

┌─────────┐     OAuth      ┌───────────┐    stream URL    ┌───────────┐
│  Ticli  │ ──────────────► │  TIDAL    │ ──────────────►  │    mpv    │
│  (TUI)  │ ◄────────────── │  API      │                  │           │
└─────────┘    metadata     └───────────┘                  └───────────┘

Requirements

• macOS or Linux
• Python 3.10+
• TIDAL Premium subscription
• mpv

Credits

Created and maintained by odonald.

Contributors:

• Garrett Simko — lossless/hi-res playback (PKCE login, segmented DASH streams), album artwork, metadata and audio caching, scrubbing, scoped search, the artist page, and macOS media keys.

Support

If you enjoy Ticli, consider buying me a coffee.

License

MIT