What is Tidalfast?
Why Tidalfast
TIDAL, native and fast. Tidalfast is a lightweight TIDAL client for Linux and Windows, written in Rust. It plays your TIDAL music on your computer without a browser engine inside, so it starts quickly and stays small.
Your favourites and playlists stay on your TIDAL account.
You need a TIDAL subscription. Tidalfast signs in to your own account and plays what that account is allowed to play.
What it does
- Plays music on this computer. Lossless (16-bit FLAC) by default, with AAC as an option, and Max (hi-res) when you sign in for it and TIDAL has the track. Choose the quality in Settings.
- Library. Browse favourites, playlists, albums, artists, and Mixes & Radio. Create, edit, and reorder your playlists.
- Search across songs, artists, albums, and playlists, with artist pages and discographies. Go to song radio (and playlist, album and artist radio) opens a page of similar songs.
- Plugins. Optional TidaLuna plugin support, off until you turn on Enable TidaLuna plugins in Settings > Plugins (TidaLuna). There are no built-in plugins.
- Now playing and equalizer. Click the player bar for a big cover with similar tracks, credits, and lyrics. The equalizer is in Settings.
- Background playback. Closing the window keeps the music playing from the system tray. Use your keyboard’s media keys to play, pause, and skip.
- Offline. Download albums, playlists and mixes, and switch on Offline mode to play only your downloads. If the connection drops, the playing song waits and carries on when you are back online.
- Upload and My Activity. Upload your own music and edit your releases, and see your monthly top artists from TIDAL.
- Themes and languages. Choose TIDAL’s dark or light look, or follow your system, and add any of 52 plugin themes when plugins are on. The interface is translated into 16 languages and follows TIDAL’s narrow layout in a small window.
What it does not do
- It needs a TIDAL subscription. It does not unlock features your plan lacks.
- It plays only streams TIDAL delivers unencrypted. It never decrypts protected streams. Downloads are offline copies kept inside Tidalfast, not files you can export; a plugin can save songs as files only after you allow it.
- It does not control other devices: music plays on the computer running Tidalfast.
- No podcasts or social features. Music videos play, but only those TIDAL serves unprotected.
- Tidalfast is unofficial. Changes at TIDAL can temporarily break features until Tidalfast is updated.
Bug reports should include tidalfast.log, panic.log after a crash, and
steps to reproduce the problem. See the
issue form.
Prior art
Tidalfast is written in Rust, with egui and fastframe for its interface. fastframe is the shared foundation of a family of native apps, including Tidalfast’s sibling ZapFast, a native client for WhatsApp. Its plugin support follows TidaLuna.
Tidalfast is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by TIDAL. TIDAL is a trademark of its owner.