qMusic

What it does

A Discord music bot for playing music from YouTube and Spotify¹ in voice channels. Full player controls — play, pause, skip, queue management — built for my friends and me.

Why I built it

My friends and I wanted seamless music playback during our D&D sessions in Discord. The existing bots either lacked features we wanted or locked them behind premium tiers.

I saw it as a chance to learn Java, work with real-time audio streaming, and build something we’d actually use regularly.

Tech stack

• Language: Java
• Discord API: JDA (Java Discord API)
• Audio: Lavalink (standalone audio node)
• Integrations: YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (49 automated releases)

What I learned

• Working with Discord’s audio system and voice connections
• Lavalink architecture for scalable audio streaming
• Setting up CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions
• The Google Cloud Console and Spotify API
• Dealing with constantly changing APIs (Discord kept evolving features…)

Why it’s paused

After 168 commits and 49 releases, I’ve paused active development.

The problem: YouTube continuously updates their anti-bot mechanisms, specifically around signature decryption for audio streams. Keeping up requires constant adaptation.

The tradeoff: The maintenance burden of fighting YouTube’s protections outweighs the benefit for a personal project. Even major projects like youtube-dl face this ongoing battle.

What would be needed to continue:

• Proxy rotation infrastructure
• Regular monitoring of YouTube API changes
• Potentially switching to alternative audio sources
• Or a convoluted workaround: running Spotify/YouTube in a VM, controlling playback via automation, and routing audio through a virtual device

My decision: Rather than sink more time into an arms race, I paused the project. The bot worked well for years and the codebase demonstrates solid engineering — that’s a success.