Listen before you save
Play any track in full, streamed from your own account, right where you found it. Nothing opens in a browser, nothing leaves the window.
v0.1.34
Explicit songs wear an E, the HIGH badge wears a cyan rim, and the Linux app starts on a stock desktop
Your TIDAL library, on your own drive
A native desktop app for saving music from your own TIDAL account for offline listening: search-first, art-forward, and built for people who would rather work in a window than a terminal. Up to HiRes Lossless and Dolby Atmos, tagged and filed the way a library manager expects, by default.
Free and open source No telemetry, ever macOS · Windows · Linux
Every view
It opens where TIDAL does, and everything is one field away
Waves lands on Browse, the same editorial front page TIDAL opens on.
One field searches artists, albums, tracks, videos, playlists and mixes at
once, and a pasted tidal.com link resolves straight to the
release. Results come back art-first, grouped by type, with color-coded
quality badges the whole way down.
Browse opens on TIDAL's editorial front page and stays current on its own. Leave Waves running for days and it quietly follows what TIDAL is featuring.
Quality of life
Everything an app like this should have done from the start
A proven engine, wrapped in the desktop app it never had. These are the parts that were missing.
Whole discographies, filtered
Save a whole discography, and decide what counts as one, down to whether a guest appearance comes along for the ride.
Best of both editions
When one edition has the bonus tracks and another the better master, Waves builds a single album taking each song at its best.
A queue that keeps its promise
Every batch accounted for, including the failures, with one button to retry them all, and a failed release says how many songs were missed and out of how many. STOP keeps what it stopped, gathered in its own section rather than emptied out of the queue. No row ever just says "done": each one tells you what it fetched and what actually arrived.
A real library layout
Files land in Artist/[Year] Album/Disc-Track. Artist - Title, the structure Plex reads natively, and every part of that is yours to change.
Remembers what it saved
Waves keeps its own receipt of every save, so a second pass at an artist fetches only what is missing. Raise the quality setting later and Waves offers to replace the older copies. A Dolby Atmos copy and a stereo one are kept side by side, so neither can ever land on top of the other.
Knows the library you already have
Experimental, off by default. Point Waves at the music you already own and it stops offering you a second copy. Your files are only ever read: never written, moved or renamed.
Lyrics that are actually right
Waves asks LRCLIB first and falls back to TIDAL, sidestepping the machine-transcribed lyrics TIDAL serves for many newer tracks.
Music videos, properly
A real video player, in the app, and a preview that plays the moment you hover a thumbnail.
At home on a NAS
A share that drops out mid-batch is waited for, and on macOS mounted back with the credentials already in your keychain, so the batch carries on where it stopped instead of failing every track left in it while you were asleep.
One-click FFmpeg
The one dependency, installed for you and checksum-verified, never something you have to go and find.
Updates you opt into
Off by default, never silent, and every build is signature-checked before it is allowed to replace the one you have.
Quality
Exactly what your plan gives you, badged on every row
Waves never guesses. Every track, album and video shows the quality it will actually arrive at, in the same color-coded badge the app uses throughout. Every one of those badges is also a control: click it and pick a tier for that one album or song, without going near Settings.
HI-RES 24-bit
HiRes Lossless
The top tier TIDAL offers, and what Waves fetches when your Audio quality setting asks for it and the release has it. Tracks arrive as FLAC at the release's native depth and rate, and nothing is resampled or transcoded on the way unless you switch on Downsample hi-res FLAC yourself.
ContainerFLAC
Bit depth24-bit
Sample rateUp to 192 kHz
Needs FFmpegFor the FLAC
Kept sharp under the hood
Don't break what works. Never stop improving what can be.
A new window on an engine that already worked. Where it did not, a handful of changes to the engine itself, each answering a problem someone actually hit.
Pooled connections
Downloads that don't heat up your laptop
A discography no longer pegs the CPU, and quit means quit, even halfway through a track.
Atomic writes
Nothing lands half-written
A download that dies mid-flight leaves nothing behind in your library. Not a stub, not a truncated track that plays for ten seconds and stops.
Native, not a web view
One real desktop window
Drawn in PySide6 / Qt Quick. No Electron, no bundled browser. Just one calm, dark console window that opens like any other desktop application.
Privacy
Waves has no way of knowing you use it
No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking. By default Waves makes no unsolicited outbound connections at all. Beyond keeping Browse current, it talks to TIDAL only to do what you just asked it to.
0analytics or telemetry events, ever
0unsolicited outbound connections by default
4optional connections, each off unless you turn it on
- The four exceptions carry nothing about you. The FFmpeg button downloads a prebuilt binary from a third-party build host: martin-riedl.de on macOS and Linux, BtbN's FFmpeg-Builds on Windows. Update checks ask the public GitHub releases page whether a newer version exists. With lyrics on, each download asks LRCLIB for that track's artist, title, album and length, and nothing else. With the library scan's MusicBrainz check on, an album the scan cannot settle is asked about at musicbrainz.org by artist and album title only, at most one request per second, with the answers cached locally.
- Diagnostics are redacted at the source, not at export. Identifying details are replaced with placeholders the instant they would otherwise be written. There is no code path left that can put them on disk unredacted.
- Logs never leave your device unless you send them. "Export report" writes a timestamped copy into your Waves config folder, and "Show file" opens it in your file manager. Where it goes next is entirely your call.
- Your own account is the only one that can read what Waves stores. On macOS and Linux the files Waves keeps for itself, your settings, your sign-in and its caches, are created readable by your account alone, not by everyone with an account on the same machine.
- This website is the same. No analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests. The font is served from this domain like everything else on the page.
Piracy
Waves does not condone piracy
Waves is a personal, non-commercial tool for reaching your own TIDAL account, using your own credentials, and it can only save what your account can play. It may not be used to infringe copyright, or to reproduce, distribute, or pirate any content. That is not a footnote buried in a license file: every install has to read it and agree to it before the app will do anything.
Before you continue
Waves is a personal, non-commercial tool for accessing your own TIDAL account. By continuing, you agree that:
- You will use Waves only for lawful, personal, non-commercial purposes, and only with content you are authorized to access.
- You will not use Waves to infringe copyright or to reproduce, distribute, or pirate any content. Respect the rights of artists and rights-holders.
- Your use of Waves may violate TIDAL's Terms of Service. You accept that risk and any consequences to your account, and you are responsible for complying with all laws that apply to you.
- Waves is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, and to the fullest extent permitted by law its developers and contributors accept no liability for any damages arising from it. See sections 15 and 16 of the AGPL-3.0.
- You will indemnify and hold harmless the developers and contributors of Waves against any claim, loss or demand arising from your use of it or your breach of these terms.
Waves is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by TIDAL. TIDAL is a trademark of its owner, used here only to identify the service Waves works with.
Waves does not collect any information from its users and has no way of knowing how the application is used. Privacy is the foundation of this application.
I have read and agree to these terms.
ACKNOWLEDGE & AGREE
Terms v1.0 (10 August 2026)
- It cannot be skipped. The gate covers the whole window, has no close control and no dismiss-on-click-outside. The only way past it is to tick the box and acknowledge.
- It cannot reach past your own account. Waves signs in with your credentials and can only see what that account can already see. It does not remove or bypass any encryption or copy protection, it is not a way around a subscription, and it does not unlock anything your plan does not include.
- Respect the people who made the music. Redistributing what you download is exactly the thing these terms rule out, and the thing this project has no interest in enabling.
Waves collects nothing, and I have no way of knowing how the application is used. There is no usage data, no account on my side, and nothing reported back. That is by design, and not an excuse. Anyone using Waves to infringe copyright is doing so against these terms and without my knowledge or consent.
What's new
Recent releases, up to v0.1.34
The headline changes across the last few releases, newest first. Turn on update checks and Waves offers each new version from inside the app, so you never have to go hunting for it. Read the full changelog, or take the deep dive through everything the app does.
Pick a quality for one album or song
Click the quality badge on any album or song and choose a tier from the menu, with no trip to Settings. The badge keeps showing your choice, and that item keeps asking for it, until you pick another tier or close Waves; a choice made on an album applies to every song in it. The menu marks a tier you already hold at that quality, so you can see before you click that a save would only fetch it again.
An artist page shows what a discography would fetch
With Most-complete edition only on, an artist page no longer lists an edition whose songs all sit inside a fuller edition of the same album, so the page shows exactly what DOWNLOAD DISCOGRAPHY would save. A new Settings switch, Show every edition on artist pages, lists them all again when you want the full picture.
A library read whole, and a settings file kept safe
Some shares hand back only part of a folder list on macOS, which used to leave albums you already had looking missing, and open to being fetched a second time. Waves now spots a short listing, finds the missing folders by name and reads the share again over a fresh connection. If your settings file is ever damaged mid-save, Waves sets the damaged file aside under its own name and starts on the defaults, instead of saving the defaults over your only copy.
STOP keeps what it stopped
STOP used to empty the queue. Now every row it ends stays in the queue, gathered into a Stopped section you can retry or clear in your own time, and it also ends a discography or editions scan that has not reached the queue yet. Signing out stops what is running the same way, instead of letting it fail one by one against the account you just left.
Download full albums, from a playlist
A playlist page has a DOWNLOAD FULL ALBUMS button that saves the complete album every song comes from, one copy per album however many of its tracks the playlist happens to list.
What you searched for is the first row
Search for a particular song, album, video or playlist and it is pinned as a Top result above every section, rather than sitting under the artists. Popularity is a sort of its own again beside Relevance, Release date and Name, and the sort you pick is remembered for next time. An artist search now keeps up to sixty matches, so a lesser-known artist who shares a name with a famous one can actually be found.
Built for the long haul
Queue tens of thousands of songs and the window stays as quick as it was with ten, and rows waiting their turn cost almost no memory until it comes. A long playlist no longer fails over one song TIDAL has taken down, a busy transfer waits and tries again when TIDAL asks it to slow down, and a release that fails says how many songs were missed, and out of how many.
Quicker, and smaller
Rest the pointer on a card, an artist or an album row and the page, its covers and its track list are ready before you click. Covers you have already loaded are kept, so a page you come back to draws at once, and a search Waves can already answer paints immediately and corrects itself when the full results arrive. Launch is quicker, a long session uses less memory, and the app is a smaller download that takes up less space once installed.
Install
Native builds for every desktop
Every name below downloads that file from the newest release. Each one
ships with a SHA-256 checksum, and every release carries a signed
SHA256SUMS manifest. Recent builds shed the Qt components
Waves never loads, so the download is around 57 MB rather than 81 MB,
and the installed app about 145 MB rather than 175 MB.
| Platform | Intel / AMD (x64) | ARM (Apple silicon, etc.) |
|---|---|---|
| macOS 15+ | waves_macos-intel.zip |
waves_macos-apple-silicon.zip |
| macOS 12–14 | waves_macos-intel_legacy.zip |
waves_macos-apple-silicon_legacy.zip |
| Windows | waves_windows-x64.zip |
waves_windows-arm64.zip |
| Linux | waves_linux-x64.zipwaves_linux-x64.AppImage |
waves_linux-arm64.zipwaves_linux-arm64.AppImage |
$
brew tap iamprivacy/waves && brew install --cask waves
That cask is macOS only. Installed through it, Waves knows: the in-app
"Update & restart" button runs brew upgrade for you. On Linux, the
AppImage needs no unzip and no install step, and the in-app updater keeps it
current in place.
Verify a downloadoptional
Every release carries two small files next to the builds: SHA256SUMS, one
line per file with its SHA-256, and SHA256SUMS.sig, an Ed25519 signature over
that file made with the Waves release key. The release page prints each file's hash next
to it. The public half of the key, compiled into every build and checked by the in-app
updater before it installs anything:
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MCowBQYDK2VwAyEAcetggrhiqyMN5HsBCi/f2gJL75FVPOYGU/sd4dI5b+0=
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----
macOS or Linux, from a folder holding the zip, SHA256SUMS and
SHA256SUMS.sig. The signature step needs OpenSSL 3: most current Linux
distributions ship it, and on macOS the built-in openssl is LibreSSL, which
cannot check it, so brew install openssl@3 and run the third line with
$(brew --prefix openssl@3)/bin/openssl in place of openssl.
printf '%s\n' '-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----' 'MCowBQYDK2VwAyEAcetggrhiqyMN5HsBCi/f2gJL75FVPOYGU/sd4dI5b+0=' '-----END PUBLIC KEY-----' > waves-release.pem
base64 --decode < SHA256SUMS.sig > SHA256SUMS.sig.bin
openssl pkeyutl -verify -pubin -inkey waves-release.pem -rawin -in SHA256SUMS -sigfile SHA256SUMS.sig.bin
grep -v '^#' SHA256SUMS | tr -d '\r' | shasum -a 256 --ignore-missing -c -
The third line must print Signature Verified Successfully and the last one
<file>: OK for the zip you downloaded (without shasum, use
sha256sum). Any other output means the file does not match this release:
delete it and download again.
Windows (PowerShell), from the same folder, with
waves_windows-x64.zip replaced by the zip you downloaded. The two hashes must
be identical; to also check the signature, run the lines above in Git Bash with OpenSSL 3.
(Get-FileHash .\waves_windows-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256).Hash.ToLower()
Select-String -Path SHA256SUMS -Pattern waves_windows-x64.zipFull notes, and the same steps kept in one place, in the README.
The deep dive
Twelve chapters, if you want the long version
Everything above, told properly: screen by screen, with the loops and the settings names. Start anywhere.
01Why Waves existsWhere it came from, and the one rule it is built on.
02Search and navigationBreadcrumbs, kept-alive pages, and an instant way back.
03BrowseArt and Console side by side, and the switch between them.
04My TIDALFavorites, shelves, and playlist folders that mirror your disk.
05Listen before you saveA preview spinning up, and the video player in full.
06The download queueEvery word a row can say, and every tier beside it.
07Whole artists and editionsWhat a discography pulls in, and how two editions merge.
08Library layout and tagsThe path templates, token by token.
09Knows what you haveWhat each pill means, and how a match is decided.
10NAS and long batchesEvery engine change, and the problem each one answered.
11Safety and privacyVerified binaries, redacted logs, and what a reset touches.
12Small thingsThe polish, and every off switch for it by name.
Free · Open source · No telemetry
Your library, organized the way you want it
Native on macOS, Windows and Linux. Nothing to buy, nothing to unlock, nothing collected.