I took the name Chilpa from chilpatl, a Classical Nahuatl word for a red wasp or hornet (avispa roja / avispón).
And yes, it is the spiritual successor of QBZ.
Cool, but just take me to the download page Sure, here is: Releases
- Local music libraries, album editions, CDs and supported disc images.
- All the formats that matters, FLAC, WAV, ALAC, DSD, DFF, and also the others Mp3, ogg, etc; CUE sheets support, SACD images: covered.
- Multiple queues, playlists, search and source-aware library browsing.
- Refine: narrow the library with conditions on artist, genre, year, composer, label, rating, quality, source, etc. Save queries, load queries, play with the library, it's yours.
- Listening stats, local only, keep track of listening, visual features like listening clock, lapse compare and export to CSV or a PNG image.
- Self-Hosted-Aware Compatible with most common self-hosted servers: Jellyfin, Subsonic, Plex, NAS, SMB, etc.
- Audio output that reports its actual format and processing state.
- Synchronized lyrics, translations and immersive views that react to audio.
- Plugins add sources and features: radio, podcasts, DSP presets and a graphic EQ, playlist import and local mood analysis, from the official catalog, the third-party catalog or any other. See Plugins.
- DAP Sync Sync DAPs or phones with the music library, track changes, multistorages, multi devices.
- A command line, as if Vim and the Quake console had a child. Press
:to open it. Try it :) - Configurable keyboard shortcuts and keyboard navigation.
- Multilingual English, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. Corrections from native speakers are welcome.
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The immersive view with synchronized lyrics.
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Offline mode blocks every network request; local playback and cached content keep working.
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curl -fsSL --proto '=https' https://chilpa.app/install.sh | bashInstalls or updates Chilpa for your user, on Linux and macOS. If macOS refuses to open the app, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/Chilpa.app once.
| Package | Platform | Updates |
|---|---|---|
| AppImage | Linux x86_64, ARM64 | In app |
| Tarball | Linux x86_64, ARM64 | In app |
| macOS app (DMG, ZIP) | Apple Silicon, Intel | In app |
| DEB, RPM | Linux x86_64, ARM64 | Package manager |
| AUR, Gentoo overlay | Linux x86_64, ARM64 | Package manager |
Install from a package manager
# Debian, Ubuntu
sudo curl -fsSL https://pkgs.chilpa.app/chilpa.gpg -o /usr/share/keyrings/chilpa.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/chilpa.gpg] https://pkgs.chilpa.app/apt stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chilpa.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install chilpa
# Fedora, RHEL
sudo curl -fsSL https://pkgs.chilpa.app/chilpa.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/chilpa.repo
sudo dnf install chilpa
# Arch
yay -S chilpa-bin
# Gentoo
eselect repository add chilpa git https://github.com/vicrodh/chilpa-overlay.git
emaint sync -r chilpa
echo 'media-sound/chilpa-bin ~amd64' | sudo tee -a /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/chilpa
emerge --ask media-sound/chilpa-binopenSUSE, signing key and ARM64 notes: INSTALL.md.
Every package is on Releases. Commands, requirements, uninstalling and where your data lives: INSTALL.md.
Install them from Settings > Plugins: press Install, switch the plugin on and approve the permissions it declares.
The official catalog is built in and works offline. The third-party catalog lists plugins by independent authors, tagged Third-party, and its README has the rules. Any other catalog can be added by URL, and Install from ZIP… takes a package downloaded by hand.
| Plugin | What it does |
|---|---|
| Radio | Stations from Radio Browser. |
| Podcasts | Shows and episodes from PodcastIndex. |
| Chilpa DSP | Equalizer, crossfeed and listening presets. |
| Playlist Importer | Imports public playlists and files, and matches them to your sources. |
| Mood | Experimental. Mood and similarity from local audio, with offline models. |
Process plugins run in a sandbox: bubblewrap on Linux (unprivileged user namespaces on, not root), Seatbelt on macOS. WASM plugins need nothing extra.
To write one, start with chilpa-plugins-sdk, and see the listing rules for the third-party catalog.
Agent Skill I spent the time working on the SDK so you won't have to if you want to develop a plugin. For example, I included a skill in the SDK repository that's compatible with the most popular agents (Claude, Codex, Kimi). As a result, I used the Spotify integration as a proof of concept and ended up with a functional plugin that's fully integrated with Chilpa in 3–4 hours (and a few hundred thousand tokens, to be honest).
Chilpa has no telemetry: no analytics, usage reports or tracking. Your stats stay on your machine.
Some optional features use online services, in the background and never holding up playback:
- Chilpa proxy: metadata, artist biographies, podcast discovery and Last.fm. Off in Settings > Integrations > Chilpa proxy.
- Chilpa lyrics API: sends track metadata for lyric searches, and the lyric lines for translation. Each has its own switch; Enable lyrics stops all lookups.
- MusicBrainz: artist relationships and release metadata. Has its own switch.
- Log upload: only when you press Upload (public). It posts the diagnostics bundle to bpa.st, a public paste that expires after a week.
Offline mode blocks all network access for Chilpa and its plugins. Local playback, DSP, and local or cached artwork and lyrics keep working. Install plugins and download Mood models first.
Rust 1.96 and Qt 6.11 or newer:
git clone https://github.com/vicrodh/chilpa.git
cd chilpa
cargo build --locked --release -p chilpa-qt
./target/release/chilpa-qtDependencies for Ubuntu 24.04 and the exact release setup: BUILDING.md.
Is Chilpa a vibe-coded app?
Yes it is. When I started QBZ it was for myself: I built it because there was no Qobuz client for Linux, and although I admire Strawberry a lot (Chilpa takes several of its features as inspiration), I have a love/hate relationship with it, so I didn't want to use the web player and I didn't want to fight with Strawberry's search either. First I made a small CLI client based on the Python downloaders, then I turned it into an API, then I fell for the Rust hype (for the better) and decided to migrate the project to that language, all by hand, as a POC, as a hobby. When LLMs went mainstream I dusted the project off, and that's when it saw the light: over its 9 months of life it became the reference open-source streaming player. Its core was hand-written code; its evolution was vibe-coded.
Chilpa, on the other hand, is 99% vibe-coded: it already had all the logic, the ADRs and, above all, the community's feedback. I have written no more than 200 lines of Chilpa's code, plus several unit tests; being optimistic, that's 1% of the code, and that's rounding up. So yes, Chilpa is a vibe-coded app. It's built responsibly, with good practices, ADRs, SOLID and the workflows I use in my real job.
It is not a weekend project. I could have handed QBZ's code to the agents and had everything ready in a couple of days, but the first release took no less than a month, because everything is written in a modular way and every module was reviewed with unit tests, with Sonar and by a human before being integrated into the app. Even so, for transparency I have to say it: it's still vibe code.
If that's a problem for you, Chilpa is probably not for you.
I have a clear path to take Chilpa where I want it to be. There is a lot of work ahead: these are the main tasks, alongside the feedback the community sends. Please open an issue for any bug you find, feature you want or idea you have.
- A control API, with its documentation
- Windows release
- Mood based and dynamic playlists. Based on your local listens, pure vectors, pure math, no AI.
- Daemon mode
- Mobile versions (iOS and Android)
- Hive mode: control any Chilpa instance from any other
- Better documentation for the SDK and plugins
Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request. Report bugs in Issues with the Chilpa version, distribution, audio backend, steps to reproduce and logs with account data removed. Ideas go to Discussions.
MIT; see LICENSE. Third-party notices are in licenses/, and the
distributed packages include the licenses of the bundled Qt and runtime
components. Plugins and optional model downloads keep their own notices.
This software stands on other people's work. Thank you to:
| Platform | Qt, cxx-qt, Rust, SQLite with rusqlite, Wasmtime |
| Audio | Symphonia, lofty, ebur128, souvlaki, dsd2pcm by Sebastian Gesemann, dst-decoder and the MPEG-4 DST reference authors |
| Look and feel | Lucide, Tabler Icons, Inter by Rasmus Andersson |
| Metadata | MusicBrainz, Cover Art Archive, ListenBrainz, Last.fm, Discogs |
| Lyrics | LRCLIB, NetEase Cloud Music, Kugou, QQ Music, Apple Music-like Lyrics |
| Servers | Jellyfin, Navidrome, Plex, Subsonic, Lyrion |
| QBZ | QBZ, for everything it taught me, and above all its community: your feedback, your bug reports and your patience shaped most of what Chilpa is |
| Crates | The authors of every crate in Cargo.lock, whose work runs under all of the above |
To Konami, for releasing Castlevania: Belmont's Curse. As Castlevania fan, this took all my attention and delayed the release for two weeks. Sorry, not sorry.