Kadenza for Apple Music
Kadenza, an unofficial, native Apple Music client for KDE.
It is built with Qt 6, Kirigami, and KDE Frameworks 6; library data comes from Apple’s REST API. Playback is delegated to a hidden Electron sidecar running MusicKit and Widevine.
The main challenge was that MusicKit is only available in JavaScript and requires an Apple Developer account/key for authentication. And DRM makes a fully native player impossible on Linux: the only Widevine CDM that exists is the one Google ships inside Chromium, and it does not have a public API. So I split the problem.
The Electron sidecar workaround comes from Slipmat, which is very similar to Kadenza but for GNOME. Miguel Rincon wrote a native GTK4/libadwaita front end in Rust with the same split: native browsing, hidden Electron sidecar for playback. The sidecar code in Kadenza is derived from his work.
Most Apple Music features are available. It integrates with MPRIS. An active subscription, network access, and x86-64 Linux are required; Widevine on Linux does not provide persistent licences so offline playback is unavailable.
Kadenza is unofficial and not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.
