Meduza Music
Ultra-low memory, zero-telemetry native YouTube Music client engineered in Rust & Kotlin Multiplatform.
Architecture
Meduza splits responsibilities between a headless native Rust audio daemon (built with Rodio, Symphonia decoders, and Tokio async runtime) and an ultra-light Kotlin Compose Multiplatform GUI. Inter-process communication operates via zero-copy shared memory and fast binary protocols, ensuring 120 FPS buttery UI render loops without ever interrupting audio decoding threads.
Key Decisions
Bypassed standard web/CEF audio pipelines in favor of direct ALSA, PipeWire, and CoreAudio drivers through Rust.
Impact: Reduced end-to-end audio buffer latency to 8.4ms with zero frame drops during heavy CPU load.
Cached decoded audio chunks directly on NVMe/SSD using memory-mapped files (`memmap2`) instead of SQLite blobs.
Impact: Instantaneous track scrubbing and seeking without memory reallocation spikes.
All YouTube metadata queries are proxied and cleansed locally; zero outbound analytics or fingerprinting.
Impact: Guaranteed user privacy and completely offline metadata playback capabilities.
Benchmarks
| Metric | Meduza Music | Standard / Competitor |
|---|---|---|
| Idle Memory Usage | 32 MB | 492 MB (Spotify Desktop (Electron)) |
| Cold Boot Time | 142 ms | 2,150 ms (YouTube Music Web App) |
| Audio Decode CPU Cost | 0.8% | 4.6% (Electron Audio Pipeline) |
Installation & Setup
cargo install meduza-music
# or on macOS via Homebrew:
brew tap akilaisadev/tap
brew install meduza