Olivia: Cloud-Based Music Player With YouTube Support And Over 25,000 Online Radio Stations

 Updated on ,
Olivia cloud music player for Linux

Olivia is a fairly new free, open source Qt5 cloud-based music player for Linux. It can play music from YouTube, comes with more than 25,000 Internet radio stations, it supports themes, has a mini player mode, it can save songs for offline playback, and much more.

The cloud-based music player is available as alpha software for testing right now. It looks like Olivia is now considered stable, with version 1.0.0 being available on the Snap Store (although there are no releases on the project GitHub releases tab).

Olivia is well integrated with YouTube, allowing users to search for songs and add them to the play queue, browse trending YouTube music with the ability to change the country, and more. To save bandwidth, Olivia only plays the audio of YouTube streams.

If you wish to save the online music to a local cache, so you can later play them without requiring Internet access, enable the Save tracks while buffering option from the Olivia settings (cog button in the upper right-hand side corner of the Olivia window, next to the Player Queue).

It's worth noting that when installed using the Snap package, the local music cache path is ~/snap/olivia/current/.local/share/org.keshavnrj.ubuntu/Olivia/downloadedTracks. I thought I'd mention this because there's no option to clear the local music cache for now.

Related: YouTube Music Support Lands In Google Play Music Desktop Player (GPMDP)

Another interesting Olivia feature is its theme support, and support for dynamic themes. From the player settings you can select the color you want the application to use, or enable a dynamic theme, which matches the player user interface to the currently playing song album art.

While I like the fact that Olivia offers support for changing the user interface colors, I would also like to have an option to use the native user interface, which is currently lacking.

Olivia mini player
Mini player

A mini player is available as well (click on the icon to the right of "playing" from the application bottom left-hand side corner), which supports transparency, and has an option to stay on top - both options are available on the Olivia settings.

What Olivia lacks, at least from my point of view, is support for more online music streaming services.

Local music is not supported either - the Local Music item in the Olivia left sidebar is only for music that was automatically downloaded by Olivia (using the Save tracks while buffering option from its settings), and not for your already existing local music, but this may change in the future.

Also, adding favorites or creating playlists doesn't work right now, even though you'll find Starred and Playlists items in the Olivia sidebar. They are probably unfinished features, and will be made functional soon.

Related: MellowPlayer Integrates Music Streaming Services With Your Desktop (Cross-Platform)

A summary of the most important Olivia features:

  • Search and play online music
  • Play music from YouTube (audio only to save bandwidth)
  • Internet radio browser and player, with more than 25,000 online radio station being available, allowing you to browse stations by country or language, and search by station, country or tag
  • Browse and play per-country top music charts (top tracks and albums), with the ability to set the country
  • Audio equalizer and visualizer
  • Customizable user interface:
    • Support for changing the user interface colors
    • Dynamic theming, based on album art
    • Hide UI elements like the Player Queue, left sidebar
    • Full screen mode
    • Mini player mode which supports transparency and always on top
    • Use system titlebar or client-side decorations
    • Set the DPI scaling factor in the player settings
  • Search and display lyrics
  • Music recommendation, showing related songs (didn't work that well for me)
  • MPRISv2 support

Download Olivia online music player


Olivia music player can be installed from the Snap Store. If your software app (like Gnome Software with the Snap plugin) supports installing snap packages, use it to search and install Olivia from there. You may also install it using a terminal and typing:

snap install olivia

If your Linux distribution doesn't support Snap packages by default, visit this page for instructions on enabling snap.

Besides snap, Olivia is also available on AUR for easy Arch Linux installation.

You also have the option of building Olivia from source.
Please post civil and on-topic comments. Commenting guidelines.