Tidal Wave is not affiliated with TIDAL Music AS.

Tidal Wave Desktop Client

Tidal Wave is a native, lightweight desktop client for the Tidal music streaming service. It is built using C++20, CMake, and Qt 6/QML, delivering a fast, system-integrated music listening experience.

Interface Screenshot

Noteworthy Features

• Native Performance: Built with C++20 and Qt 6, bypassing heavy web wrappers for a minimal CPU and memory footprint.
• Media Keys and MPRIS2: Full Linux media player integration via D-Bus MPRIS2, supporting lockscreen controls, system volume widgets, and media keys.
• Secure Authentication: Implements Tidal OAuth device login flow with secure local session caching using SQLite.
• Custom Audio Player: Native streaming audio engine utilizing QMediaPlayer and QAudioOutput with selectable stream qualities.
• Persistent Navigation State: Separate loaders retain individual page states when jumping between Home, Search, and My Collection views.
• Queue Panel: Full queue management including track ordering, shuffle, and cycle repeat modes.
• System Tray Integration: Background playback support with system tray control options to show, hide, and quit the application.
• Rich Detail Pages: Dedicated views for albums, artists, playlists, and mixes. Biographies are parsed as rich text with clickable navigation links.
• Robust Sleep Timer: Persistent background sleep timer in the Now Playing page with presets, a custom slider, a toggleable fade-out fader (with pop-prevention delay), and an end-of-track stopping mode.

AI notice

I used Claude Code over the course of 3 days 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

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% increment)
Down	Volume down (5% increment)
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	Fullscreen Now Playing view
Ctrl + Q	Toggle Queue panel
Escape	Go back
Alt + Left	Go back
Ctrl + ,	Open Settings

Prerequisites

• C++20-compliant compiler (GCC 11+, Clang 13+, MSVC 2022+)
• CMake 3.20+
• Qt 6 SDK (6.4+), specifically the following modules: Core, Gui, Widgets, Quick, Qml, QmlModels, Network, DBus, Multimedia, Sql, Svg, Concurrent
• On Linux: libsqlite3-dev and libasound2-dev (or similar ALSA development libraries)

Building from Source

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release --parallel 4

Running the Application

On Linux and macOS:

./build/tidal-wave

On Windows:

build\Release\tidal-wave.exe

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 License. See the LICENSE file for details.