tidalamp

A terminal TIDAL client for Linux with a retro player interface. No official API app registration and no browser in the middle: device flow + mpv.

Quick start

sudo apt install mpv    # dnf, zypper or pacman elsewhere — see Requirements
pipx install "tidalamp[art]"
tidalamp

Authorize once through the link it prints, and the session is kept at ~/.config/tidalamp/session.json. Then: / searches, l opens your library, and z x c v are previous, play/pause, stop and next.

Contents

• Installation
• Hi-res, all the way to the DAC
• Keys
• Queue and library
• The track menu
• Quality
  • Important limitation: DRM
• Themes and colours
• Settings
  • The audio stack
  • Language
• Lyrics
• Equalizer and balance
• About the analyzer
• Cover art
• Desktop integration (MPRIS)
• Help and about
• Troubleshooting
• Platform support
• License
• Disclaimer

Installation

[!IMPORTANT] Availability: PyPI is the active installation channel. The AUR package is ready, but its publication is delayed because registration of new AUR accounts remains closed during the service's security hardening. No reopening date has been announced.

Requirements

Python 3.11 or newer. Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 39 and current Arch all qualify. Ubuntu 22.04 (3.10) and Debian 11 (3.9) do not, and pipx there fails while resolving the version rather than while running.

pip does not install mpv. It is a system package and must be present, or tidalamp exits on startup saying so. cava is optional and gives a real spectrum instead of the RMS meter.

If mpv is missing, tidalamp reads /etc/os-release and names the command for the system it is on, so the error is actionable wherever you run it. cava is not packaged everywhere; where it is missing, the RMS meter takes over and nothing else changes.

From PyPI

This is the channel for every distribution today, Arch included.

pipx install "tidalamp[art]"  # the art extra adds Pillow for cover rendering
tidalamp

Without the art extra everything works except the cover, which is simply not drawn; tidalamp says so once in the status line at startup.

Arch Linux (AUR)

There is no AUR package to install yet, so yay has nothing to find — use PyPI above. When new-account registration reopens, yay -S tidalamp becomes the recommended Arch route, because the AUR can declare mpv as a real dependency and cava as optional.

From the repository

python -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[art]"   # drop [art] only if you do not want cover art
.venv/bin/tidalamp login
.venv/bin/tidalamp

Running tidalamp with no subcommand opens the player. The explicit tidalamp tui command remains available and does exactly the same thing.

The release process is documented in publish.md, and packaging notes in packaging/README.md.

Updating

pipx upgrade tidalamp

pipx reinstalls from the spec it was given, so the art extra is kept. pipx upgrade-all covers tidalamp along with everything else pipx manages.

Right after a release, pipx may still answer already at latest version with the previous number: pip caches the package index for a few minutes. Either wait, or skip the cache for one run:

PIP_NO_CACHE_DIR=1 pipx upgrade tidalamp

From a repository checkout instead:

git pull
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[art]"

mpv and cava are system packages — your distribution updates those, not pipx.

To check which version is running:

tidalamp --version    # or -v

The same number is on the help screen (?, then → for About), together with the notes for each release; pipx list shows what is installed.

Minimum size

The interface needs 76×20 cells. Below that size the fixed layout would overlap, so tidalamp covers it with a message showing the current and required dimensions. The normal interface returns automatically when the terminal is enlarged.

Hi-res, all the way to the DAC

tidalamp asks TIDAL for HI_RES_LOSSLESS by default and plays FLAC up to 24-bit / 192 kHz, with the bit depth and sample rate of the running stream on screen. When TIDAL delivers less than was asked for, the status bar says so instead of leaving the badge to imply otherwise.

Three things had to be right for that, and two of them are not in the player:

• The stream. Hi-res arrives as a segmented DASH manifest, which needs rewriting before ffmpeg will open it.
• The graph. PipeWire runs at one sample rate and resamples everything into it, so a 24/96 stream commonly reaches the DAC at 48 kHz while every badge tells the truth about the stream. The settings window detects this, says so plainly, and fixes it — see The audio stack.
• The chain. No software volume attenuation and no filters: with the balance centred and the equalizer flat, mpv carries astats alone, which measures and does not touch the signal.

Bluetooth cannot carry any of this, whatever the rates say, and the settings window warns when the output is a Bluetooth sink.

Keys

The transport defaults are Winamp's z x c v, except that play and pause share one key. All of them may be changed from config.toml, and the buttons then show the key that actually works.

Navigation keys are fixed — arrows, Page Up/Down, Enter and Esc — because a typo there could make the browser unusable.

Queue and library

/ searches for tracks and displays them directly, with albums, artists and playlists in three category rows above; a category is fetched only when opened.

Press l to open the library browser: playlists, favourite tracks, albums, and artists. Enter a level with ↵ and go back with ⌫.

g brings the queue cursor back to the track that is playing. If the queue search is hiding it, the search is cleared first. p asks for a name and saves a snapshot of the queue as a TIDAL playlist, in queue order rather than shuffle order. Large queues are sent in batches; if TIDAL stops accepting them part-way through, the partial playlist is kept and the status line says exactly how many tracks made it.

• ↵ on a track plays it and queues the entire level, so the rest of the album or playlist follows it.
• a appends an item without interrupting the current track. On a playlist or album, it appends all of its contents.
• A appends every track in the current level.

Modal windows — the library, search, settings, lyrics, help — take a share of the terminal rather than a fixed 84x26, so a large screen gets a large library.

Turn transparency on (in the settings window, or in the config file) and they open over a translucent scrim instead, leaving the player visible and dimmed behind them: a terminal cannot blur, and the scrim is what stands in for it. While a modal is open the player stops redrawing itself, so the scrim costs less than the opaque window did.

Turning it on also limits the cover to blocks or off for as long as it lasts, and switches to blocks when it has to, saying so. Blocks are ordinary characters, so the window draws over them; an image sent with the kitty or sixel protocol is painted by the terminal over the text, which would put the album art on top of the window you are reading. The change applies immediately — the cover is redrawn with the new protocol without restarting tidalamp.

The settings window over the scrim. Transparencia is on, and Carátula sitting on blocks underneath it is the move this made on your behalf.

• / filters the level you are on, from a bar at the foot of the window that narrows the list underneath instead of covering it. What it filters is whatever the level holds: tracks in your favourites, playlists in My playlists, albums, artists, or a category of search results. Case and accents are ignored — sinfonia finds Sinfonía — every word you type has to match somewhere, and a track is also found by its album, which is not on the line unless you turned that column on. ↵ applies the filter and gives the arrows back to the list; Esc clears it and leaves the browser open, on the row you had reached. The more… row is never filtered out, because a level is one page deep until you ask for the rest.

f adds the selected track, album, artist, or playlist to TIDAL favourites; F removes it.

s toggles shuffle and r cycles repeat (off → queue → track). Both sit on the transport row as buttons, lit in the palette's accent while they are on. Every state is also readable without colour: ⇄○/⇄● for shuffle, and ↻–/↻A/↻1 for the three repeat modes — the retro, nova and ascii layouts spell the same states out as SHUFFLE ○ and REPEAT 1.

p saves the queue as a new TIDAL playlist: it asks for a name and creates it with the tracks in queue order, not in shuffle order, because what is saved is the list and not the listening session. To append to a playlist that already exists, use ≡ in the track menu instead.

ctrl+f searches the queue, from a bar under the playlist, the same gesture the browser's / is: type and the queue narrows to what matches, without covering it. It matches the same way — case and accents ignored, every word has to appear somewhere, and a track is also found by its album. The rows keep the number they really have in the queue, so a match numbered 47 tells you where it is in the playing order rather than pretending to be the first track. ↵ gives the arrows back to the list with the filter still applied, and Esc clears it and leaves the cursor on the track you had reached. Everything that acts on the selected row — ↵, d, alt+↑, alt+↓, f — acts on that track and not on its place on screen.

alt+↑ and alt+↓ move the selected track. With shuffle enabled, moving a row does not reshuffle what comes next. While the queue is filtered the rows may not visibly reorder — the track it swapped with can be one the filter is hiding — but the number at the head of the line changes, because that is the queue position.

Long levels are paginated in groups of 100. The final row is more…; pressing ↵ on it loads the next page into the same level without losing the cursor position. Opened levels are cached for the lifetime of the application, so returning to one is instant. R fetches the current level again, which is useful after creating a playlist on another device.

The queue is stored at ~/.local/state/tidalamp/queue.json and restored on startup, including the previous cursor. Anything slow runs in the background, and a spinner names what is pending — ⠋ opening My playlist… — instead of freezing the interface.

Queue columns

A wide enough terminal splits the queue into columns instead of running the artist into the title. Which ones is up to you: the settings window (o) has a Queue columns row that opens a picker, and the choice applies to the queue already on screen rather than to the next one loaded.

The queue position on the left and the title are always drawn, and a field TIDAL has no answer for leaves its cell blank rather than inventing a value.

Columns are dropped as the window narrows, in the order they can be spared — the year before the album, the album before the artist — ending at artist - title on one line with the duration on the right. The artist only leaves the title when it has a column of its own to go to.

The track menu

↵ on a song — in search results or in the library — opens a small menu instead of assuming what you meant. m opens the same menu on the queue row under the cursor, where ↵ already plays it:

↑ ↓ and ↵ pick, Esc backs out. ↵ on an album, artist or playlist still opens it: a level has one obvious thing to do.

Not every track has a radio station — TIDAL simply has none for some obscure releases — and when it does not, the status line says so and nothing is queued.

Quality

The default requested quality is HI_RES_LOSSLESS. TIDAL answers with one of two manifest kinds: BTS is a progressive URL mpv opens directly, and MPD is the segmented DASH used for hi-res. Measured against a real account on 2026-09-08:

In other words, requesting LOSSLESS never produced lossless audio through the device-flow client: TIDAL returned HIGH even for tracks it labels LOSSLESS. Requesting HI_RES_LOSSLESS yields FLAC where available and HIGH otherwise, so it is strictly better than the old default.

When TIDAL delivers less than requested, the status bar says so (TIDAL delivered HIGH, not HI_RES_LOSSLESS) instead of leaving the badge to imply it.

TIDALAMP_QUALITY=HIGH tidalamp

Valid values are LOW, HIGH, LOSSLESS, and HI_RES_LOSSLESS.

Important limitation: DRM

Tracks with encrypted Widevine manifests cannot be played by mpv because there is no CDM to decrypt them. tidalamp detects this and reports it in the status bar instead of failing with a codec error. If it happens frequently, lower the quality with TIDALAMP_QUALITY=HIGH.

Themes and colours

Two independent settings. theme picks the layout — how the interface is drawn. palette picks the colours it is drawn in. Any layout works with any palette, and both can be changed from the settings window (o) without restarting playback.

theme = "quattro"	theme = "retro"
theme = "nova"	theme = "ascii"

palette accepts auto (follow Omarchy), classic (green-on-black, the player's own), the built-ins tokyo-night, catppuccin, nord, gruvbox and black — pure black with grey and white accents, where lightness carries what hue carries elsewhere — or the name of a TOML file you drop in ~/.config/tidalamp/palettes/. Custom palettes use the same format as Omarchy's colors.toml, so the built-ins and your own work on any Linux, with or without Omarchy.

The same layout, repainted. These are Omarchy themes picked up through auto, plus the player's own classic green-on-black, which is what you get anywhere else.

On Omarchy, tidalamp reads the active palette from $XDG_STATE_HOME/omarchy/current/theme/colors.toml (or ~/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme/colors.toml) and applies it throughout the UI. Changing the theme while the TUI is open updates the palette within two seconds without disturbing playback. Everywhere else, and for a missing or invalid file, it falls back to its own green-on-black classic. The integration only reads Omarchy state; it does not modify themes or require the omarchy command.

Settings

o opens a settings window — the transport bar lists it, next to ? help. Every row writes ~/.config/tidalamp/config.toml, so a change made once stays made.

tidalamp config shows the effective settings and creates the file if it does not exist:

quality = "HI_RES_LOSSLESS"   # LOW, HIGH, LOSSLESS, or HI_RES_LOSSLESS
artwork = "auto"              # auto, kitty, sixel, blocks, or off
language = "auto"             # auto follows the locale; es or en pin it
columns = "artist,album,year,duration"   # queue columns, comma separated
theme = "quattro"             # layout: quattro, retro, nova, or ascii
palette = "auto"              # colours: auto, classic, a built-in, or your own
visualizer = "bars"           # analyzer shape: bars, mirror, curve, or fine
debug = false                 # log to ~/.local/state/tidalamp/tidalamp.log

[keys]
play = "p"
quit = "ctrl+q"

Precedence is environment → file → default. TIDALAMP_QUALITY, TIDALAMP_ART, TIDALAMP_LANG, TIDALAMP_COLUMNS, TIDALAMP_THEME, TIDALAMP_PALETTE, TIDALAMP_VISUALIZER, and TIDALAMP_DEBUG therefore override the file for one-off runs; the settings window labels a row whose value is being shadowed that way, rather than showing a value the app is not using. A syntax error in the file does not prevent startup; it is logged and the defaults take over.

Under [keys], the action is on the left and the key on the right; separate multiple keys with commas. Valid actions are the ones in the key table, and tidalamp config warns about unknown ones.

The audio stack

The same window shows what is underneath mpv, because nothing else can:

  Hi-res rates in PipeWire   not configured
                               the graph is stuck at 48000 Hz and resamples…
  Restart PipeWire           action

  Output: Your USB DAC Analog Stereo · 48000 Hz s32le

PipeWire runs its graph at one sample rate and resamples everything into it. By default that is often a single allowed rate, so a 24/96 stream reaches the DAC at 48 kHz: the badge in the player is telling the truth about the stream, and the DAC still never sees hi-res. Hi-res rates in PipeWire drops a file into ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/ that lets the graph follow the stream, and Restart PipeWire applies it — stopping playback first, since mpv is holding the sink.

The window also names the output and warns when it is Bluetooth, which cannot carry lossless whatever the rates say. Both actions are reversible: the row toggles the file back off, and deleting it by hand does the same.

Language

English and Spanish are built in; Spanish is the fallback for unsupported locales. With auto, the standard LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, and LANG variables are consulted in that order.

language = "en"   # auto, es, or en

To override for one run:

TIDALAMP_LANG=en tidalamp

Lyrics

y opens lyrics for the current track without stopping playback. When TIDAL provides LRC subtitles, the active line is highlighted and the window follows mpv's position. Plain text can be scrolled with ↑, ↓, PageUp, and PageDown.

Not every track has lyrics, and regional licences do not always expose them. In that case, the window displays an error and playback continues normally.

Equalizer and balance

e opens a ten-band equalizer (60 Hz … 16 kHz, matching Winamp) with a ±12 dB range. Use ←→ to select a band, ↑↓ to adjust it, and 0 to flatten it. Changes are applied while you move them; an equalizer you cannot hear until pressing “OK” is not useful.

p and P walk through eight presets — flat, rock, pop, jazz, classical, vocal, bass and treble — and the one you are on is named under the bands. Move a band afterwards and it stops being that preset and says manual, because the name is worked out from the gains rather than remembered.

, and . move the balance, and \ centres it, including from the main window. The position, volume and balance bars also accept a click; clicking position while no track is loaded does nothing.

Settings are stored in ~/.local/state/tidalamp/settings.json and reapplied on startup.

About the analyzer

The quality display identifies which of two modes is active:

• FFT: with cava installed, tidalamp runs it against the audio sink and draws the measured spectrum — a real FFT.
• RMS: without cava, mpv exposes only levels through its astats filter. The analyzer becomes a band-shaped meter with fast attack and slow decay. It reacts to music but is not a frequency breakdown, and the badge says so.

Installing cava is enough; no configuration is needed — see Requirements for the command on your distribution. If cava is missing, dies, or cannot open the sink, tidalamp returns to the RMS meter without interrupting playback.

One honest caveat: cava listens to the sink, not specifically to tidalamp's mpv process. It displays everything playing on the machine, which is usually just tidalamp.

Shapes

The visualizer setting picks how that spectrum is drawn. All four read the same frame, so switching between them costs a redraw and nothing else — cava is never restarted, and neither is the music.

fine needs a font with Braille. Most have it — every Nerd Font, DejaVu, the Noto family — but a font without it draws boxes, and a terminal cannot be asked beforehand, so it is a shape you choose rather than one anything falls back to.

All four are drawn where the analyzer has always been — beside the cover, under the track details — and all three run to the right edge of the window. Nothing moves and no row is taken from the queue.

The bars are capped at 64 bands and made wider to cover the width, rather than growing thinner as the terminal grows: on a 4K display the uncapped version cost the app 55% of a core at ten frames a second, because every band is an escape sequence the terminal has to chew through. Capped and with runs of one colour merged, the same picture costs about 8%.

Change it from the settings window (o, under Appearance), from config.toml, or with TIDALAMP_VISUALIZER=curve tidalamp. It applies immediately.

Cover art

Album art is drawn to the left of the display, in a box that grows with the terminal from 18×9 cells up to 40×20. The renderer is selected automatically from the terminal's capabilities:

Detection reads $TERM, $TERM_PROGRAM, and $KITTY_WINDOW_ID, and falls back to blocks, which work everywhere.

blocks draws with the quadrant glyphs (▘▝▖▗▚▞…), so each cell carries four samples: two across and two down. A cell still holds only two colours, so where its four pixels disagree they are split into a light group and a dark one and each is averaged — on a photograph neighbouring pixels rarely disagree by much. Before this the renderer used ▀ alone, which spent a whole cell's width on a single pixel and made covers look stretched. The glyphs come from the same Block Elements range as ▀ and █, so nothing is asked of a font that was not asked before.

To force a renderer:

TIDALAMP_ART=blocks tidalamp   # kitty | sixel | blocks | off

Pillow is required to decode images, and the art extra installs it (pipx install "tidalamp[art]"). Without it, cover art is omitted and everything else keeps working — the same treatment as a missing cava — and the status bar says so at startup. Covers are cached under ~/.cache/tidalamp/art/, keyed by URL.

Desktop integration (MPRIS)

On startup, tidalamp publishes org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.tidalamp on the session bus. Anything that speaks MPRIS can see it without extra configuration:

playerctl -p tidalamp play-pause
playerctl -p tidalamp metadata

This supports Hyprland media keys, Waybar's mpris module (including cover art through mpris:artUrl), and external widgets such as a Quickshell frontend. The complete queue is published as org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.TrackList, so a client can list it and jump to any row.

If there is no session bus, playback still starts and the status bar reports that MPRIS is unavailable.

Help and about

? (or h) opens a window listing every key with what it does, grouped by what you are doing: playback, volume, the queue, the windows, favourites, and the keys that only apply inside search and the library. It reads the bindings from the running app, so a key rebound in config.toml shows up there as the key you actually have to press.

The window has two tabs. → moves to About — version, author, repository, licence and a summary of what each released version brought — and ← comes back to the keys, where you left them.

↑ ↓ scroll, PgUp PgDn a page, Home End jump to either end, and ?, h or Esc close it.

Troubleshooting

If mpv dies, tidalamp starts a fresh process and reloads the current track. Expired tokens are refreshed automatically; tidalamp login is only needed when there is no usable refresh token. Failed TIDAL calls are retried with backoff.

For anything else, TIDALAMP_DEBUG=1 tidalamp writes to ~/.local/state/tidalamp/tidalamp.log. The TUI owns the terminal, so logging goes to a file.

Platform support

tidalamp is a Linux application. Real playback has been tested on Arch Linux with Omarchy, and the automated test suite runs on Ubuntu.

A missing D-Bus session only disables MPRIS and desktop media controls; it does not stop playback. Cover art also falls back to terminal blocks when kitty graphics and sixel are unavailable.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE for the complete text.

Disclaimer

tidalamp is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by TIDAL, Aspiro, Square, or the owners of the Winamp trademark. Names are used only descriptively to identify the service it communicates with and the player its key defaults and equalizer bands come from.

• You need your own TIDAL subscription. tidalamp provides no access beyond what your account already has.
• tidalamp does not circumvent technical protection measures. Tracks with encrypted Widevine manifests are rejected with a message; no decryption is attempted. This boundary is deliberate, and patches that add decryption or download audio to files will not be accepted.
• tidalamp does not download or redistribute music. Audio is streamed. The only on-disk playback artifact is a temporary HLS playlist containing URLs, not audio.
• Authentication uses TIDAL's device authorization flow through tidalapi, not the developer API. Using an unofficial client may conflict with TIDAL's terms of service; users accept that decision and any risk to their account.

The licence applies to this code. It is not, and cannot be, permission from TIDAL.