Downbeat

A small Android app that finds a song by its title and keeps it as an MP3. It searches YouTube through yt-dlp, converts the audio with ffmpeg, and publishes the result to Music/Downbeat so it shows up in any music player.

The UI follows the Material 3 Expressive direction: big touch targets, varied round shapes (scalloped "cookie" artwork, pill search field, squircles), bold type and a wavy progress indicator instead of a plain linear bar.

Features

• Search by title or artist — results come from a ytsearch query handled by yt-dlp.
• One-tap MP3 — the best audio stream is extracted and converted to MP3 (V0) with ffmpeg.
• Download from a link — paste any URL supported by yt-dlp, or share a link into the app from a browser. Direct audio URLs are streamed without the engine.
• Visible in music apps — files are published through MediaStore to Music/Downbeat (legacy path on Android 9 and older).
• Fallback on failure — if a direct download fails, the source link stays in the list with Retry / Open link / Copy link actions.
• Download history — completed downloads survive restarts.
• Languages — System / English / Русский, switchable inside the app.
• Themes — Graphite, Sand and Ocean, each with light and dark variants.
• Cancellable downloads — removing an item also stops the underlying yt-dlp process.
• Background engine init — yt-dlp and ffmpeg are prepared off the main thread.

Download

Grab the APK from Releases:

File	Target
Downbeat-*-arm64-v8a.apk	Phones and tablets (almost all modern devices)
Downbeat-*-x86_64.apk	Emulators
Downbeat-*-sources.zip	Full source tree

Requires Android 7.0 (API 24) or newer.

Build

Requirements: JDK 17+ (21 works), Android SDK with platform 35.

git clone https://github.com/HELFZz/downbeat.git
cd downbeat
echo "sdk.dir=/path/to/Android/Sdk" > local.properties
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug

APKs appear in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/. The Gradle wrapper is included, so a local Gradle installation is not needed.

Release builds are signed with the local debug keystore so the published APKs can be installed directly. This is a hobby project, not a Play Store distribution.

Checks:

./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest :app:lintDebug

Tech stack

• Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3
• youtubedl-android (yt-dlp + ffmpeg, Python bundled)
• OkHttp for direct audio URLs, Coil for artwork
• kotlinx.serialization, kotlinx.coroutines
• DataStore-free settings on SharedPreferences

Project layout

app/src/main/java/com/downloader/app
├── data/          engine wrapper, search parser, storage, history, settings, ViewModel
├── i18n/          English and Russian strings
└── ui/            Compose screens, components and themes

Disclaimer

Downbeat is a personal downloader. Only download content you own or are allowed to download. Respect the terms of service of the sites you use and the rights of the authors. The app is not affiliated with YouTube, yt-dlp or Google.