Ondographics

What it is

Ondographics is a desktop client for YouTube Music that runs where the previous one stopped: it never repackages, renames or wraps a binary, and it never loads a native module, so the stock Electron runtime it runs on keeps the reputation Windows checks for. That single decision is the whole design, and the rest of the app follows from it.

Around that window sits a hub the app serves itself: a catalogue of music its own artists licensed for exactly this, browsable by shelf or search, with a queue, a seek bar and instant playback and no account anywhere. Audius, Jamendo, the Internet Archive and YouTube are asked at once and interleaved, so the catalogue reads as one library rather than four tabs.

Everything the app plays feeds the same audio reading, so the visualiser, the OBS card and the hub react to all of it in the same way. That is the point of it being one app rather than a browser with a window around it.

What it does

• One catalogue, several sources

  Audius, Jamendo and the Internet Archive need no account and no key. YouTube joins them through yt-dlp, which the app fetches once from its own release. Every search asks all of them and interleaves the answers.

• A player, not a page in a window

  Transport controls are driven over YouTube's own player API rather than by clicking at the DOM, and the rest of the app reads what is playing from the media session.

• Tray, media keys and the taskbar

  Every control is in the tray, the global media keys work with the window closed, and the taskbar thumbnail carries its own transport buttons.

• Remember where you were

  The last track or playlist comes back on launch, with an opt-out. The PC is kept awake while it plays, if you want that.

• 152 visualiser scenes

  A window of live previews, one tile per scene, drawn from the audio with intensity, speed, glow and detail you can tune. See below.

• A now-playing card for OBS

  Ten styles, ten palettes and eleven audio shapes, served from the app on 127.0.0.1. Pick a style from a window of live previews and an overlay already open in OBS changes as you click.

• Song requests from Twitch

  A chat command or a channel-point redemption puts a viewer's song into the queue of whichever surface is playing, behind the song that is on. Read straight from Twitch's EventSub, or through OBS if you prefer.

• What you are listening to, in Discord

  Track and artist in your own profile and every server you are in, with a progress bar Discord moves itself. Off by default and adds no dependency.

• A pixel pet and a room to furnish

  Songs earn coins and experience as they play, a first listen is worth more than a repeat, and the coins buy furniture for the pet's room, which you place where you like. A history of the last 300 songs sits beside it and plays them again.

• Its own appearance

  The accent, the second colour, the layout of a shelf and the whole window are settings. Presets for seasons and moods, a hue drift you can move, and per-scene colour and intensity.

• It recovers on its own

  A failed load gives an in-window error with a Retry that never touches your session. A stalled player shell is detected and self-healed once before you are asked.

• It is one product, built twice

  The public build contains no downloader at all. The Local build, for the machine that keeps its own tools, adds saving songs to a folder.

The visualisers

152 designs, and all but six of them are drawn rather than photographed. Forty are the first collection, including the ten seasonal scenes; the rest are grouped by what they are: gaming, streamer, cyberpunk, sci-fi, retro, fantasy, neon, anime, nature, lo-fi, and six imagery scenes that are drawn over real public-domain photographs from the NASA image library.

Choosing one is a window of live previews, each tile running the real served page with a sample track, and previews load and animate only as they come into view. Intensity, speed, glow and detail apply immediately and in place, so moving a slider never interrupts the audio reading. Colours are chosen per scene, and the collection can be made monochrome.

It also does two things a visualiser usually cannot. A switch clears a real 16:9 hole out of the middle of the picture for your camera, with a lit rim between the band and the hole, so a camera source under the browser source in OBS shows through. And a logo can be placed in a corner, centred, bound to a scene's own sun or moon, or sent travelling across the frame, lit as it passes, driven by how loud the music is.

What it deliberately does not do

These are the things that make a YouTube Music client stop working, and this one does not do them by default:

• No ad blocking unless you ask for it. It exists and it is switchable, but it stays off until you turn it on. Nothing is blocked by default.
• No patching, spoofing or stripping of the web app's own code or requests. The one concession is the user agent, and it is a setting.
• No auto-updater. Auto-update is the mechanism that produced an unsigned executable in the first place, and it is not coming back.
• No repackaged binary, not even in the archive. The download is a folder and two .cmd files around the stock Electron runtime, so there is no wrapper for Windows to object to and nothing for Smart App Control to refuse.

Getting it running

1. Download the archive from the download page.
2. Unzip it anywhere. Double-click run.cmd to run it where it sits, or install.cmd to put it in the Start menu.
3. Sign in to YouTube Music in the window that opens, if you want that half of it. The hub needs no account at all.

Nothing is written outside your own user folder, no service or driver is installed, and uninstalling leaves your settings where they were.