YouTube Music with nothing in the way.

Zero Client Youtube Music Player is a small native player for Windows. It plays your music, keeps songs on disk for next time, and shrinks into a notch at the top of your screen.

Download for Windows Read the docs

Version 1.0.0. 7.5 MB installer. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. Free and open source.

That black notch at the top of this page is the mini player. Point at it.Tap it.

ZCYMP's settings: the song cache switch, its size limit and the delete button, in the flat dark look.

What it does

Keeps what you play: A song that finishes streaming stays on disk. The next play starts at once, needs no network and works offline. Set the limit from 256 MB to 10 GB; the songs you played longest ago go first. One switch turns it off and one button deletes it all.
An island for a mini player: Press Ctrl+M and the app becomes a notch at the top centre of your screen, above every other window, showing the cover and the song. Point at it and it opens into a player with seek, previous, play and next. Double-click it for the full-screen player.
Loads ahead of you: The next song in the queue and its cover are fetched before you need them. Artwork travels over HTTP/2, or HTTP/3 where your network carries it, and falls back by itself. Explore opens from disk while the fresh page loads.
Artwork on your terms: Pick Off, Low, Balanced or High. Switch album covers, artist pictures and row covers on or off separately. Lower settings download smaller pictures and keep less in memory; Off downloads none.
Tracks of any length: Long mixes play through a sliding window of a few megabytes instead of sitting in memory whole, so a stream that runs for hundreds of hours costs the same as a ten-minute one.
Stays as you left it: No self-updater and no version checks. The app talks to YouTube and Google's servers for your music and nothing else, unless you turn on SponsorBlock to skip the talking in music videos.

Left out on purpose

ZCYMP started as ytm-rs and took things away until only the player was left. If you want any of these, ytm-rs has them.

Lyrics
Karaoke
Music videos
27 themes
Listen together
Spotify transfer
Last.fm
Discord presence
Auto-update

Every switch is yours

Settings are plain rows with plain words. These are from the app as it ships.

Display settings: artwork quality, album and playlist covers, artist pictures, corners, and Explore shelves. — **Display.** Artwork quality, which pictures load, and which Explore shelves show.

Appearance settings: mode, accent colour, album-art background, font and zoom. — **Appearance.** Flat by default. The blurred album-art background is one switch away.

Playback settings in light mode: autoplay, crossfade, hide explicit songs, volume normalization. — **Light mode.** Follows Windows, or pick one.

Cache settings: song cache switch, size limit, delete cache button, and the download folder. — **Cache and downloads.** See what is kept and delete it in one click.

Download for Windows

Version 1.0.0 for Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. Both downloads are the same app.

Installer

Installs for your user account, no administrator rights needed. Adds Start menu and desktop shortcuts and an entry in Windows' Apps list for uninstalling.

Download installer (7.5 MB)

SHA-256 8955dae0da57d651175d446b5311ab8f0493f120c96750d621016d7bf4df07d8

Portable

Unzip anywhere and run zcymp.exe. Settings, sign-in and caches stay in a data folder beside it, so it can live on a USB stick.

Download portable zip (9.9 MB)

SHA-256 553f6229da26f8586b81d13142633052cae3601761a53017b333bcd528657b36

Windows will warn you the first time. The build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. You can check the file against the SHA-256 above first.
Signing in uses Microsoft Edge WebView2. It ships with Windows 11 and up-to-date Windows 10. You can also listen without signing in.
Source code. Download the source (zip) or see all checksums. Build steps are in the docs.