The Best Discord Music Bot

June 14, 2026 at 10:00 PM · Updated June 14, 2026 at 10:02 PM · Sam
selfhostingdiscordmusic

Rythm, the Discord music bot that started it all

A few years back, Discord music bots took a massive hit…

It came about as Rythm, the most popular bot, was issued a cease and desist by YouTube for allowing the playing of YouTube-posted content into Discord channels. This then led to them shutting down, which was a great shame.

For the past couple of years I was using Jockie Music, which basically pretends to not use YouTube, but still does — I am pretty sure.

So I thought, what if I just made my own, from scratch?

And using the usual methods (Claude), it has been done… but I don’t think this is fully vibe-codeable — well, I didn’t write a line of actual code myself, but it required me to actually think about how some of the features could be made and how the problems could be fixed.

This is because about halfway through development, my VPS got sniped by YouTube as they discovered it was a bot, and there is only one way around it — which is to give YT-DLP cookies from a proper computer, so that Google thinks I am a completely legitimate person!

But that was a massive pain, as every other couple of days I would have to manually upload from my laptop, or have my laptop open for it to be working. So I just used a library called Playwright , which allows you to spin up a little Chromium instance, open up YouTube, sign in, and then it makes the cookies for you — no other computer required.

Here’s how the bot works

For most usage:

  1. Node.js backend (for the basic bot)
  2. Using a command like splay <url> causes the URL to be passed to youtube-sr for searching — this takes some of the load off YT-DLP
  3. YT-DLP then takes the URL passed from youtube-sr and extracts a stream from it, ffmpeg turns this into something Discord can use, and then it is finally played
flowchart TD A[splay command] --> B{Query type?} B -->|Search text| C[youtube-sr] B -->|Single URL| D[yt-dlp\n--dump-json] B -->|YouTube playlist / radio| E[yt-dlp\n--flat-playlist] B -->|Spotify playlist| F[Spotify API] --> G[Search queries] --> C C --> H[YouTube URL] D --> H E --> I[Multiple YouTube URLs] H --> J[yt-dlp -g\nstream URL] I --> J J --> K[ffmpeg\nOGG/Opus 128k] K --> L[Discord voice]

On the VPS, two Docker containers run:

  1. One for the cookie getter
  2. One for the actual bot

Can I use this bot myself?

Yes — if there is actual interest a few people can use my instance, so contact me .

Otherwise, you can go to the GitHub repo and follow the guide there to get it up and running yourself on your own VPS using Docker. It is really quite simple — I use Debian, just in case that is helpful!

And if you self-host, the bot can never get taken down, as you can just spin up a new one.