Tidal Wave is not affiliated with TIDAL Music AS.

Tidal Wave

A desktop client for Tidal, written in C++ with Qt 6 and QML rather than wrapped around a web view. It plays your collection, playlists and mixes, searches the catalogue, follows album and artist pages, and keeps a queue you can reorder.

You need a Tidal account with an active subscription, and lossless playback needs a plan that includes it.

It is built and used on Linux, specifically openSUSE with KDE Plasma on Wayland; X11 works too. The macOS and Windows builds get far less attention, and docs/MACOS-FIRST-RUN.md is the running list of what is known to be wrong on a Mac. The goal is for this to be the easiest thing to install on whatever system you happen to use.

More screenshots: collection, album, now playing, search

Features

• Login uses Tidal's OAuth device flow. You type your password on Tidal's own site in your browser, and the app never sees it. The session is cached as plain JSON in ~/.config/tidal-wave/credentials.json; see Privacy below.
• Four stream qualities: 96 kbps, 320 kbps, lossless, and hi-res lossless.
• Media keys, the lock screen and the desktop's player widget work through MPRIS2 on D-Bus.
• The audio output follows the system default device as it changes, or stays on a device you pick. Position and play state survive the switch (src/player/Player.cpp).
• Chromecast and Google Home output, on Linux only. A built-in HTTP server streams the current track to the device as FLAC up to 96 kHz or as AAC, downsampling on the fly so every quality tier casts.
• One flat sidebar list of your playlists, albums, artists and mixes, pinned first, then recently played, then A-Z, with a search field above it that also matches saved songs. Below 820px of window width it collapses to a 68px icon rail that hover-expands back over the content (qml/components/SideBar.qml, qml/components/LibraryFinder.qml).
• Pin albums, playlists, artists and mixes above that list and drag them into the order you want. Pins are kept per Tidal user id (src/ui/PinStore.cpp).
• Six themes, three dark (Sea, Pine, Rust) and three light (Sky, Sand, Clay), paired by hue, plus a true-black switch for OLED screens. Switching repaints the running app (src/ui/ThemePalette.cpp).
• A complete German catalogue, following your system locale by default and switchable without a restart (src/ui/I18n.cpp, i18n/tidal-wave_de.ts).
• The window goes down to 640x600, stacking the Now Playing transport and dropping the player bar's volume and cast controls on the way.
• A queue panel with drag-to-reorder, shuffle and the three repeat modes.
• A system tray icon, so playback carries on with the window closed.
• Album, artist, playlist and mix pages. Biographies are parsed as rich text with every name a link.
• A sleep timer on the Now Playing page, with presets, a custom slider, an optional fade-out and a mode that stops at the end of the track.
• The Qt scene graph can be moved onto the CPU for machines where the GPU path misbehaves. Qt picks the backend before the first window exists, so this needs a restart (src/ui/Prefs.cpp, src/ui/Application.cpp).
• A daily update check against the GitHub releases API, which you can turn off. See Privacy below.

AI notice

I used Claude Code to generate most of the code for this project, since I recently won some Anthropic API credits and wanted to put them to use. I also don't currently have the time to do this any other way, even if I wanted to. It's a shame, since I'm generally really not a supporter of AI, but I wanted the performance increase and the money was already spent.

Keyboard shortcuts

These are fixed; there is no rebinding UI yet. The table lives in src/ui/Shortcuts.cpp.

Shortcut	Action
Space	Play / pause
Ctrl + Right	Next track
Ctrl + Left	Previous track
Right	Seek forward 10 seconds
Left	Seek backward 10 seconds
Up	Volume up (5%)
Down	Volume down (5%)
Ctrl + M	Mute / unmute
Ctrl + S	Toggle shuffle
Ctrl + R	Cycle repeat mode (off / all / one)
Ctrl + 1	Go to Home
Ctrl + 2	Go to Search
Ctrl + 3	Go to Collection
Ctrl + N	Go to Now Playing
F11	Toggle fullscreen
Ctrl + J	Toggle the queue panel
Escape	Go back
Alt + Left	Go back
Ctrl + ,	Open Settings

On macOS Qt maps Ctrl onto Command, so Ctrl + M collides with Minimize and F11 with Mission Control. Both are left as they are, since Linux is where the app ships.

Installation

Prebuilt downloads for every platform are on the latest release. ffmpeg is optional, and only downloads and Chromecast need it.

Each release carries a SHA256SUMS file. To check a download, put the two in one directory and run sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing.

Linux, Debian / Ubuntu / Mint (recommended)

Download tidal-wave-linux-x86_64.deb, then:

sudo apt install ./tidal-wave-linux-x86_64.deb

apt pulls in the Qt 6 runtime and the QML modules. Launch it from your app menu or run tidal-wave.

The package is built on Debian 12 and needs Qt 6.4 or newer. That means Debian 12 or later and Ubuntu 24.04 or later, which is also what Linux Mint 22 and LMDE 6 are built on. It was checked by installing and starting it on Debian 12, Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04. On an older release apt refuses the install and names what is missing. Use the AppImage there.

Linux, any distribution (AppImage)

Download tidal-wave-x86_64.AppImage, then:

chmod +x tidal-wave-x86_64.AppImage
./tidal-wave-x86_64.AppImage

The file runs as it is and installs nothing. To have it in the application menu and kept up to date, open it with Gear Lever or AppImageLauncher.

Qt 6.12 and FFmpeg are inside, so no Qt has to be installed. The host supplies glibc 2.34 or newer, OpenGL and EGL, fontconfig, OpenSSL 3 with its CA certificates, libcom_err and libgpg-error. A desktop installation has all of them. On a minimal Debian or Ubuntu they are:

sudo apt install libgl1 libegl1 libfontconfig1 ca-certificates libcom-err2 libgpg-error0

The file mounts itself with FUSE. Where FUSE is missing, add --appimage-extract-and-run.

It was checked by starting it in a clean container of Debian 12 and 13, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Fedora 44 and AlmaLinux 9.

Linux, other distros (Fedora, Arch, …)

Download tidal-wave-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, extract it, and run the binary:

tar -xzf tidal-wave-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
./tidal-wave

Install the runtime yourself. This build links Qt 6 Core, Gui, Widgets, Quick, Qml, QmlModels, Network, DBus, Multimedia, Svg and QuickControls2, and wants ffmpeg and avahi for Chromecast. The QML modules are the ones people miss: QtQuick, QtQuick.Shapes, QtQuick.Controls, QtQuick.Layouts, QtQuick.Window, QtQuick.Templates, QtQml.Models and QtQml.WorkerScript. On Wayland you also need the Qt 6 Wayland platform plugin. Building from source is often easier on these distros.

macOS (Apple Silicon)

Download tidal-wave-macos-arm64.tar.gz and unpack it. The release is built on GitHub's macos-latest runner, which is Apple Silicon. On an Intel Mac, build from source.

The app is unsigned, so macOS quarantines it. Clear that once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine tidal-wave.app

Then double-click tidal-wave.app, or right-click it and choose Open on the first launch. For downloads, brew install ffmpeg.

Windows 10 / 11

Download tidal-wave-windows-x64.zip, extract the folder anywhere, and run tidal-wave.exe. It's unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time: click More info, then Run anyway. The Qt runtime and the QML are in the folder. For downloads, install ffmpeg and add it to your PATH.

Build from source (any OS)

You need a C++20 compiler (GCC 11+ / Clang 13+ / MSVC 2022+), CMake 3.20+, and Qt 6. CMakeLists.txt asks for Qt 6.4 as its floor, but the only two configurations anyone builds are CI's Qt 6.12 and the bookworm container in packaging/, which is 6.4.2. Treat anything in between as untested.

OS	Command
Debian/Ubuntu	sudo apt install build-essential cmake pkg-config qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-multimedia-dev qt6-svg-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools libavahi-client-dev qml6-module-qtquick-controls qml6-module-qtquick-shapes ffmpeg
Fedora	sudo dnf install gcc-c++ cmake qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel qt6-qtmultimedia-devel qt6-qtsvg-devel qt6-qttools-devel avahi-devel ffmpeg
Arch	sudo pacman -S base-devel cmake ninja qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-multimedia qt6-svg qt6-tools avahi ffmpeg
macOS	brew install cmake qt ffmpeg
Windows	Install Qt 6 (MSVC 2022) + CMake + Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools

Do not skip the Qt Linguist tools in those lines. CMake treats them as optional, so without them the configure step prints one warning and then builds a binary with no German in it, which looks like a translation bug.

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release   # macOS: add -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(brew --prefix qt)
cmake --build build --config Release --parallel 4
./build/tidal-wave                                # Windows: build\Release\tidal-wave.exe ; macOS: open build/tidal-wave.app

The tests are behind an option that defaults to off:

cmake -B build -S . -DTIDALWAVE_BUILD_TESTS=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build build && ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

For a Debian package, run packaging/build-deb.sh. It builds in a Debian 12 container and leaves the .deb in dist/. Plain cpack -G DEB in your build directory works too, but the dependency floors come from whichever toolchain configured the build, so a package built against Qt 6.12 and GCC 16 asks for versions almost nobody has.

ffmpeg is the package's only Recommends. Everything else is a hard Depends, including qt6-wayland and the easy-to-miss qml6-module-* runtime modules. Downloads and Chromecast shell out to ffmpeg and say so when it is missing, so the app still runs without it.

Linker error about lame_* / mp3lame? A few distros ship a statically linked FFmpeg inside Qt Multimedia, which leaks an undeclared libmp3lame dependency at final link time. Install your distro's libmp3lame/lame dev package and configure with -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-lmp3lame -lm".

Chromecast output is Linux-only, since it uses Avahi and mDNS. It is excluded automatically on macOS and Windows.

Privacy

Tidal Wave has no account, no server and no telemetry. Everything below can be checked against the source in a few minutes; the file that does each thing is named.

What leaves your machine

• Tidal, to log in. https://auth.tidal.com/v1/oauth2/... (src/api/Auth.cpp). The device flow sends a client id and secret compiled into the app (src/api/Auth.h), then the device code, then your refresh token. You type your password on Tidal's own site in your browser, which the app opens with xdg-open.
• Tidal, for everything you do in the app. https://api.tidal.com/v1/... (src/api/TidalApi.cpp, src/api/TidalClient.cpp). Every request carries your access token and your country code, so Tidal sees what you search for, which albums, artists, playlists and mixes you open, what you play, what you favourite, and the playlists you create or edit. That is the streaming service working, not something extra the client adds. One detail worth knowing: the app sends a desktop browser User-Agent string rather than its own name (TidalApi::makeRequest).
• Tidal, for audio and artwork. Audio comes from the CDN URL in the playback manifest (src/player/Player.cpp, src/player/Downloader.cpp). Cover art comes from https://resources.tidal.com/images/... (src/ui/ImageProvider.cpp), and those requests carry no account token.
• Your local network, while you cast. Discovery is mDNS: the app asks Avahi to browse for _googlecast._tcp on every interface (src/cast/CastDiscovery.cpp), which is multicast traffic your whole LAN can see. Picking a device opens a TLS connection and sends the track title, artist, album and a resources.tidal.com cover URL (src/cast/CastSession.cpp, src/cast/CastManager.cpp); Chromecasts use self-signed certificates, so the app does not verify them. To feed the device it starts a small HTTP server on your LAN address on a random port (src/cast/CastMediaServer.cpp). That server is unauthenticated, so while a track is casting, anything on your network that connects to the port is served that track. It stops when casting stops, and none of it runs unless you open the cast menu.
• GitHub, for the update check. One GET to https://api.github.com/repos/immineal/tidal-wave/releases/latest, at most once every 24 hours (src/ui/UpdateCheck.cpp). It sends no account data and no identifier, but it does send a User-Agent of tidal-wave/<version> (+https://github.com/immineal/tidal-wave), so GitHub sees your IP address and which version you run. The reply is a version number and a link.
• Nothing, for feedback. The two buttons in Settings -> Feedback open a URL and stop there. "Open a GitHub issue" builds https://github.com/immineal/tidal-wave/issues/new?title=...&body=..., "Send an email" builds mailto:tidal-wave@linu.li?subject=... (src/ui/Feedback.cpp), and both go to Application::openUrl, which is xdg-open. Your browser or your mail client does the talking, and only when you press send there. The issue body is prefilled with the app version, QSysInfo::prettyProductName() and the Qt the build was compiled against and is running on, and nothing about your account or what you have played. tidal-wave@linu.li is a mailbox kept for this; the app never signs in to it and carries no credential for it.

What is stored on your machine

• ~/.config/tidal-wave/credentials.json holds your access and refresh tokens, the token expiry, your Tidal user id, your country code and your display name (Auth::saveCredentials). It is plain JSON, readable and writable by your user only, not encrypted and not in a system keyring, so anything running as you can read it, and the refresh token is enough to use your account. Logging out deletes it. Note the lowercase directory name: this is not the same place as the settings below.
• ~/.config/TidalWave/Tidal Wave.conf is the QSettings file. It holds the theme, language, sidebar width, audio output device and software rendering flag (src/ui/Prefs.cpp), the preferred stream quality (src/api/TidalBridge.cpp), the last download folder (src/player/Downloader.cpp), your pinned items and recently played list keyed by Tidal user id (src/ui/PinStore.cpp, src/player/Player.cpp), and the update check's state (src/ui/UpdateCheck.cpp).
• ~/.local/share/TidalWave/Tidal Wave/ (QStandardPaths::AppDataLocation) holds library/albumtracks-<userId>.json, a cache of your library's album track listings so that searching your collection does not re-fetch it (src/api/LibraryIndex.cpp).
• ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/tidal-wave.svg and 128x128/apps/tidal-wave.png are the app icon, installed by cmake --install so the tray, taskbar and launcher can resolve it by name. The app writes a copy itself only when the icon theme has none, which happens when it runs from a build tree (Application::loadAppIcon). docs/ICONS.md maps every surface the icon appears on.
• Downloads go wherever you choose in the save dialog, defaulting to your Music folder. Cast transcodes are temporary files named tidal-wave-cast-* in your temp directory, each deleted when the next track is prepared and when the app shuts down (CastMediaPrep::cancel). A crash leaves the last one behind.
• On Linux the current track is published on your session bus over MPRIS2, which is how media keys and the desktop's media widget work. Any program running as you can read it.

Deleting those paths removes everything the app has kept about you.

The update check

It is cached to disk, so most launches make no request at all. A newer release is offered at the next launch rather than in the middle of a session, with Open release, Later and Skip this version. Tidal Wave never downloads, installs or applies an update by itself.

To turn it off, set update/enabled to false in the settings file above, which you can do before the first launch. With it off, UpdateCheck::startupCheck() and checkNow() return immediately and no QNetworkAccessManager is ever created.

License

GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later). The full text of GPLv3 is in LICENSE.