Audly

Overview

Audly is a desktop app that wraps yt-dlp and FFmpeg into a clean, native-feeling UI for pulling audio from any supported URL. Built for Mac and Windows with a single PyInstaller binary.

Why I built it

I needed a fast way to extract audio without touching the command line every time. The existing tools were either too complex or required runtime dependencies that non-technical users couldn't manage.

Technical highlights

• –Single-file PyInstaller binary with bundled FFmpeg
• –Async download queue to keep the UI responsive during extraction
• –Format negotiation via yt-dlp's API rather than shell invocation
• –Cross-platform path handling for Mac and Windows release targets

Hardest engineering problem

Getting PyInstaller to correctly bundle FFmpeg binaries without path conflicts on both platforms required careful spec file tuning and separate CI pipelines per OS.

What I learned

Packaging Python apps for distribution is deceptively hard. Reproducible builds and signed binaries are a separate engineering problem from the app itself.

Stack

Links