SoundCloud Desktop

A personal SoundCloud client for macOS. Tauri 2 + Rust backend, React frontend. Custom UI over SoundCloud's internal api-v2 (the same API their web app uses), authenticated with your own account via an embedded sign-in window.

Screenshots

Feed	Likes

Search	Artist page

Features

• Sign in with SoundCloud — embedded sign-in window, no token copying; the session (and DataDome clearance for write ops) is captured automatically
• Home feed — tracks and reposts from artists you follow, infinite scroll
• Likes, reposts & follows — like/repost tracks and playlists, follow artists, all with instant toggles everywhere
• Playlists — browse/play your library, create playlists, add/remove tracks via an add-to-playlist picker
• Search & artist pages — tracks / artists / playlists, with popular, albums, reposts & likes tabs; your own profile (uploads + reposts) lives in the sidebar
• Station autoplay — when the queue runs out, related tracks keep playing (toggleable)
• Offline downloads — cache tracks locally (HLS → ffmpeg remux to .m4a), LRU cache with size cap, plays offline
• Real player — queue management, canvas waveform seeking, media keys, macOS Now Playing / Control Center integration
• Discord Rich Presence — "Listening to SoundCloud" with track, artist, artwork, and a live progress bar (Spotify-style); hides while paused, toggleable in Settings
• Go+-only tracks play their 30s preview (free account); geo-blocked tracks are skipped

Install

brew tap inkitori/tap
brew trust inkitori/tap
brew install --cask soundcloud-desktop
xattr -cr "/Applications/SoundCloud Desktop.app"

The xattr step is needed because the app isn't notarized with Apple — without it, macOS claims the app is "damaged". On Homebrew 5.x, skip brew trust (it doesn't exist there) and use brew install --cask --no-quarantine instead of the xattr step.

The app checks GitHub Releases on launch and updates itself in the background (restart from Settings when prompted) — no brew upgrade needed. You can also grab the .dmg directly from Releases.

Optional: brew install ffmpeg enables offline downloads as .m4a (without it, downloads are stored as raw fMP4, which usually still plays).

Developing

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # development
pnpm tauri build    # produces the .app under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macOS/

Requirements: Rust, Node + pnpm.

Releasing

Releases are built and published by CI (.github/workflows/release.yml) on a tag push. The usual release path is:

pnpm release          # patch release, e.g. 0.2.1 -> 0.2.2
pnpm release minor    # minor release, e.g. 0.2.1 -> 0.3.0
pnpm release 0.3.0    # explicit version

scripts/publish.sh checks that main is clean, fetches origin/main and tags, runs pnpm build, bumps all version files, commits, tags, pushes main plus the tag, then watches the GitHub Actions release run when gh is installed. Use scripts/publish.sh --dry-run to preview the next version.

For a local-only bump/tag without pushing, use scripts/publish.sh --no-push or the lower-level scripts/release.sh 0.3.0.

CI builds a universal (Intel + Apple Silicon) macOS app, signs the updater artifacts, publishes a GitHub Release with the .dmg + latest.json update manifest, and bumps the cask in inkitori/homebrew-tap.

Two repo secrets drive this: TAURI_SIGNING_PRIVATE_KEY (updater signing key — the local copy lives at ~/.tauri/soundcloud-desktop.key; if it's lost, existing installs can never verify another update) and TAP_DEPLOY_KEY (SSH deploy key with write access to the tap repo).

Connecting your account

Click Sign in with SoundCloud on first run: a SoundCloud sign-in window opens, you log in like normal, and it closes by itself once the app has captured the session (stored in the app's local data folder). The same window also yields a DataDome clearance cookie, which is what unblocks likes, reposts and playlist edits.

When the session expires (or SoundCloud's bot protection starts blocking writes), the app shows a dialog — Sign in again reopens the window, which usually closes within seconds because the webview still has a live SoundCloud session.

Manual fallback: both the oauth_token and datadome cookies can still be pasted by hand (connect screen → "Sign in manually", or Settings → Advanced) — copy them from your browser's DevTools → Cookies → soundcloud.com.

How it works / maintenance notes

This is an unofficial client; SoundCloud can change the internal API at any time. Known moving parts, and where they're handled:

• client_id is scraped from soundcloud.com's JS bundles (src-tauri/src/sc/client_id.rs) and auto-refreshed on any 401/403.
• Stream URLs must be resolved per-play: each transcoding resolve requires the track's track_authorization JWT, and the returned CDN URL is signed and expires (observed ~2h in mid-2026; historically as little as 5 min). The player re-resolves and seek-restores automatically on failure (src/player/audioController.ts).
• Some transcodings (e.g. abr_sq) return 404 on free accounts — the resolver falls through candidates by quality (src-tauri/src/media/resolver.rs).
• Write-op endpoint shapes (PUT /users/{me}/track_likes/{id}, PUT /playlists/{id} with a full track-id array, PUT /me/track_reposts/{id}, POST /me/followings/{id}, POST /playlists for creation) follow the web app's known patterns but were not verified against a live account at build time. If a write fails, capture the exact request on soundcloud.com via DevTools → Network and adjust src-tauri/src/sc/endpoints.rs.
• Rate limiting: a global ~800ms gap between api-v2 calls; 429s honor Retry-After with backoff.

Downloads live in ~/Library/Application Support/com.enyouki.soundcloud/ (audio/ + cache.db). Downloading streams is against SoundCloud's ToS — this app is for personal use.

Keyboard

• Space — play/pause
• Shift+→ / Shift+← — next / previous