AudioOnly — YouTube Music Mode

About

Turn YouTube into a music player — no video, no distractions, pure audio.
AudioOnly transforms YouTube into a clean, distraction-free listening experience with an animated music visualizer, hidden suggestion thumbnails, and zero bloat.

The Problem: YouTube Is Designed to Keep Your Eyes Busy
You open YouTube to listen to music, a podcast, or a long lecture. Within seconds you're staring at autoplay suggestions, clickbait thumbnails, and an algorithmically curated sidebar engineered to pull your attention away from what you actually came to hear.
You don't want to watch. You want to listen. But YouTube won't let you just do that.

The Solution: AudioOnly — YouTube Music Mode for Chrome
AudioOnly overlays the YouTube video player with a sleek animated music visualizer, hides distracting suggestion thumbnails in the sidebar, and lets the audio play completely uninterrupted — turning YouTube into the music and podcast player it should have always been.

✨ Why Users Love AudioOnly
🎵 Music Mode — Beautiful Visualizer, Zero Video Distraction
One click activates Music Mode, replacing the YouTube video player with a dark animated music visualizer. Your audio keeps playing without interruption while the visual noise disappears completely. Perfect for music, lectures, podcasts, and audiobooks.
🖼️ Hidden Suggestion Thumbnails — Keep Your Focus
AudioOnly replaces sidebar video thumbnails with clean dark placeholders — so the clickbait images that derail your session are gone, while video titles, channel names, durations, and avatars remain fully visible and clickable. Browse intentionally, not impulsively.
🔄 Seamless SPA Navigation — Works Across Every Video
YouTube is a single-page application, meaning navigating between videos doesn't fully reload the page. AudioOnly handles this natively — Music Mode and thumbnail hiding follow you automatically from video to video without requiring a refresh or re-click.
👁️ Smart Lazy-Load Handling
As you scroll the sidebar and new video cards load dynamically, AudioOnly's scoped MutationObserver catches and processes them automatically. No thumbnail ever slips through, even on long scroll sessions.
🪶 Truly Lightweight — No Bloat, No Tracking, No External Requests
AudioOnly makes zero external network requests. No analytics, no telemetry, no remote assets. Everything runs locally inside your browser with a minimal memory footprint — exactly as a well-built MV3 extension should.
🛡️ Manifest V3 — Modern, Secure, Future-Proof
Built entirely on Chrome's latest Manifest V3 standard for tighter security, reduced permissions, and long-term compatibility with Chrome's extension platform.

🔒 Privacy-First. Absolutely No Data Collected.

No account or sign-up required.
Zero external network requests — ever.
No browsing history, watch history, or personal data collected or transmitted.
No third-party scripts, trackers, or analytics of any kind.


🙋 Perfect For:

Music lovers who use YouTube as their primary streaming source
Students listening to lectures without getting pulled into recommendations
Professionals running YouTube audio in the background while working
Anyone who wants to use YouTube intentionally — not algorithmically
Podcast and long-form audio listeners who don't need the video


📥 Install AudioOnly and Finally Listen to YouTube — Without the Noise.
One install. One click. Pure audio, zero distraction.