Yandex Music for VS Code

Listen to Yandex Music without leaving the editor: My Vibe, your liked tracks, playlists and search.

Install

Install Yandex Music Player from the Visual Studio Marketplace, or search for it in the Extensions view, or run:

code --install-extension entro.vscode-yandex-music

Builds are also attached to GitHub releases as .vsix files: Extensions → … → Install from VSIX…

Controls

• Player panel — the {✷} icon in the Activity Bar. Cover art, a waveform seek bar, volume, the queue, playlists and search. Search also finds genres: rock, jazz or рок puts up to three matching genre stations above the tracks, and clicking one starts endless radio of that genre, as My Vibe does. Track radio under the current track keeps it playing and fills the queue after it with endless music like it. Liked shows your liked tracks without touching the queue; Liked plays from the track you pick there. The button next to Vibe sets up My Vibe as on the site: character, mood and language (Russian, foreign or no words). While My Vibe plays, a change keeps the current track and replaces the tracks after it.

• Status bar — ‹ ▶ › buttons and the current track. Hover over the track or click it to open a mini player with previous, play/pause, next and like.

• Keyboard shortcuts

  macOS	Windows / Linux	Action
  Cmd+Alt+P	Ctrl+Alt+P	Play / pause
  Cmd+Alt+→	Ctrl+Alt+→	Next track
  Cmd+Alt+←	Ctrl+Alt+←	Previous track

Every action is also available from the Command Palette under the Yandex Music category.

Signing in

Run Yandex Music: Sign In from the Command Palette.

• In the browser. The extension opens a separate Chrome, Yandex Browser, Edge or Brave window with the Yandex sign-in page, catches the redirect and exchanges the code for a token itself. That window keeps you signed in to Yandex, so the next sign-in is one click. Without a Chromium-based browser the page opens in your default browser; after signing in, paste the music.yandex.ru/oauth?code=… link from the browser history into VS Code.
• With a token. Paste an existing Yandex Music OAuth token.

The browser sign-in uses the same OAuth client as the Yandex Music desktop app and asks only for music and basic account access. The token is kept in VS Code SecretStorage, which is backed by the system keychain. On macOS the player service also keeps a copy in the login keychain (item vscode-yandex-music), so the fullscreen remote can start it without VS Code; signing out deletes it.

Full tracks need a Yandex Plus subscription; without it Yandex serves 30-second previews. Tracks stream as MP3 at up to 320 kbps, and the mini player shows the current codec and bitrate.

Several VS Code windows

macOS. Music plays in a small background process, not in a window, so closing or reloading a window doesn't interrupt it. Every window is a remote control showing the same track, queue and progress. The process starts the first time you play music and exits a few seconds after the last VS Code window closes.

Windows and Linux. Music plays in one window at a time; the others act as remote controls. A command that starts playback moves the audio to the window it came from once you have clicked inside that window's player panel — the webview is only allowed to play sound after a click inside it. If the window that plays music closes, another one picks up from the same track and position.

Fullscreen remote (macOS)

Yandex Music Remote is a separate fullscreen app for a big screen: a large cover with a spinning record, a background in the cover's colors, a waveform progress bar and controls you can hit from across the room. It is a native macOS app of a few megabytes, which takes some 60 MB of memory with a video playing. It plays nothing itself: it controls the player service that the extension runs on macOS, the same way a VS Code window does, and starts that service itself when it isn't running, so it works without VS Code open. The music keeps playing while the app is open, even after VS Code is closed.

The ⛶ button in the player panel's title bar opens it, and so does Yandex Music: Open Fullscreen Remote. The extension has to be installed and signed in once. The app comes with the extension: when it isn't installed yet, or came with an older version of the extension, the button installs it first, by itself: it copies it into ~/Applications, takes it out of quarantine and opens it. Yandex Music: Install Fullscreen Remote installs it again. For music videos from YouTube the app needs yt-dlp, which the install puts in with Homebrew when it isn't there; without it those videos are left out.

The remote has the same Liked list and My Vibe settings: Liked opens the list in the side panel, and the button next to Vibe opens the settings.

Media keys keep working through the player service's Now Playing.

Videos and genres. Where a track has a video, the remote plays it without sound, in this order:

1. its music video, which fills the background: a 30-second preview from the iTunes Store, or the video on YouTube that Wikidata or Genius links to, unless it is only the cover on a still frame (an auto-generated "Topic" or an "Official Audio" upload), played from its video stream (up to 720p), which yt-dlp finds;
2. the track's video shot, Yandex Music's short looping video, in the cover's place;
3. the artist's background video from Yandex Music, or else the wide video on the artist's Apple Music page;
4. the album's motion cover from Apple Music, in the cover's place.

A video that fills the background brings up Video among the buttons at the top: it shows the whole video, not dimmed, with the player over it, which fades out with the pointer, and puts it back in the background when pressed again (or with Esc). The choice stays: while it is on, every next video comes to the front at once, also after the app is restarted.

Next to the title, the album's genre starts that genre's radio. Videos and the genre are looked up only while the remote's window is open and in sight, not minimized or hidden. For the music videos the track's artist and title go to the iTunes Search API, Wikidata and, once you give the extension a token, Genius, which knows the most of them: create an API client at genius.com/api-clients, generate its Client Access Token and enter it with Yandex Music: Set Genius Token for Music Videos (VS Code keeps it with its secrets, the player service a copy in the login keychain). For the motion covers and the artists' videos the album and the artist are looked up on the iTunes Search API and their pages on music.apple.com. Turn these off with yandexMusic.remote.musicVideos and yandexMusic.remote.motionCovers. With reduced motion turned on in macOS, the remote plays no videos.

AI-generated music

Tracks that Yandex Music labels as AI-generated get a mark in the player panel, the queue and search results, the status bar, the mini player and the fullscreen remote. The extension doesn't skip or dislike them; it only shows the mark. The label is Yandex Music's own, the one in its "About the track" card: AI when the rights holder says the track was made fully or partly with AI, AI? when Yandex's detector found it was possibly made with AI. Hover over the mark for which. No mark means only that Yandex hasn't labeled the track. The playing track, the next ones in the queue and search results are looked up; turn this off with yandexMusic.aiLabels.

Settings

Source code, issues and building instructions are on GitHub; see DEVELOPMENT.md for building and testing.

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial client and is not affiliated with Yandex. It uses the same undocumented API as the official apps, which may change at any time.