Free · open source · built for AniList
Karasu watches what you play and read and keeps your AniList progress in sync — no buttons to press.
Playing in mpvWatching in mpv
TrackedAnime Title — Episode 01
Identifying…Matched on your listUpdates in a momentUpdated to episode 1
Free
MIT licensed, no paid tier.
Open source
Every commit is public.
Built for AniList
Implicit OAuth, no client secret.
No telemetry
No analytics, no backend, no account of ours.
The problem
Tracking is five small steps you repeat for every episode and every chapter. Karasu turns them into none.
By hand
With Karasu
It sees what you play.
Your system's media sessions, your player or browser window, an mpv pipe, or your own Jellyfin server — Karasu reads whichever is there.
It only ever moves forward.
A scrobble can raise your progress, never lower it, and it re-checks your list a moment before it writes.
It asks if you want it to.
Turn on the confirmation toast and every update waits for one click on the desktop.
Which sources exist on which platform is listed under Platforms.
How it works
Six steps, all of them Karasu's. The only one you take is the first.
01You press play
In a player, a browser tab, or on your Jellyfin server.
02Karasu notices
Media sessions, window titles, an mpv pipe, or Jellyfin's session list.
03It reads the title
A release-name parser and a fuzzy matcher against your list.
04And the episode
Season splits and redirects included, from the community's relations data.
05Your settings apply
Threshold, confirmation, corrections and offsets.
06AniList is updated
Progress moves forward; a receipt with an undo lands in the app.
That is the default. Set a number of minutes instead, or ask for the confirmation toast and decide per episode.
Nothing is written while the player is paused; resume, and the next check is due.
Progress can only go up, and your list is read again right before the write so an edit you made meanwhile wins.
When a source reports a season Karasu cannot match, it stops and offers the sequels — it does not guess.
What it recognises
Windows has all of these. Linux reads media sessions, mpv and Jellyfin, and no window titles; Android reads Jellyfin. The Platforms section has the whole table.
Local library
Point Karasu at the anime you keep on disk and it tells you which episode is next — one click opens it.
01Your folder
The one you already have. Up to 20,000 files, six levels deep.
02Karasu scans
Release names are parsed the same way detection parses them.
03Matches your list
Each title reads exact, close, or yours once you have corrected it.
04Knows what is next
The first episode past your progress, per title.
05Plays it
In your default player, or in mpv if you point Karasu at it.
Corrections stick.
Re-point a title once; a rescan never undoes it.
Seasons can be split.
A folder numbered straight through is split into the AniList entries it spans — Karasu proposes the split, you confirm it.
Unplaced titles get a suggestion.
Karasu asks AniList for its best guess, and applies it only when you confirm.
Karasu never downloads anything. The library is the folder you already have; how the files got there is not the app's business.
Offline
A tracker that stops working on a train is not much of a tracker. Karasu keeps the list, keeps the edit, and keeps its word about which is which.
01Online
Your list is fetched and cached in a local SQLite database.
02The network goes
The list you had stays readable; a title on it opens with a working +1.
03You edit anyway
Progress, status, score — the change is queued, not lost.
04The queue waits
Per account, inspectable in Settings, each entry discardable.
05The network returns
Queued edits are sent in order the next time a list opens.
The receipt says which one happened. A queued edit is a promise Karasu keeps later, and it tells you so.
Browsing titles you have not added, search and the social pages need the network, and say so instead of pretending.
Every queued edit is stamped with the account that made it and is only ever sent for that account.
Statistics
Half of it is drawn from the list Karasu already holds — the sunburst, your watch time, your scores against the crowd — and the rest is AniList's own statistics, fetched once and kept for half an hour.
Five tabs
Overview, ratings, years, genres and tags, people and studios.
Drawn by hand
Radar, sunburst, treemap, area, dot plot, gradient bars and heatmaps — SVG the app draws itself, no chart library.
Your scores against the crowd
The one figure AniList's own statistics page does not give you, computed from your cached list.
A year in review
A poster of your year or season in five crops, exported as PNG or JPEG at up to 3×.
Features
Each of these is in the current release, and each has a row in the site's content audit naming the code that makes it true.
The list
Karasu reads and writes scores in the format your AniList account uses — 100-point, 10-point with or without decimals, five stars or three smileys — in every control, badge and chart.
Manga
Chapters and volumes both, with a continue-reading row on the overview. On Windows, a chapter open in your browser on MangaDex, MANGA Plus, Comick, Bato.to, MangaFire or Asura Scans is recognised like an episode.
Notifications
New episodes of what you are watching land as desktop notifications. Sequel announcements and on-hold reminders are there to switch on. Your AniList notifications share the same bell, grouped when they arrive in bursts.
Android
The Android build is a sideloaded APK with the same list, the same statistics and Jellyfin detection. Four home-screen widgets draw straight from the cached list with no network, and a background job checks AniList's notifications even while Karasu is closed.
Discovery
A seasonal page with a picker that reaches four years back, a Monday-first calendar with iCal export, a franchise graph you can pan and zoom, recommendations weighted by your own scores, and search across anime, manga, users, characters, staff and studios.
Activities
The activity feed, profiles with follow and affinity, forum threads and comments, text posts, likes and replies — AniList's own data, rendered by an AniList client. Nothing social is kept on your machine, and every further page is a button rather than a scroll, so the request budget stays yours.
Playing Karasu
Anime Title
Episode 4 / 12 · Watching
18:32 left
Discord
Off until you switch it on. When it is on, Discord shows the title, the episode or chapter and a timer, with a button to the project — never your AniList name, and never a title your content filter hides.
Yours to keep
Start without an account and keep a local list; connect AniList later and Karasu merges the two. Export to MyAnimeList XML or a JSON backup in either mode; import into a local list. A daily local backup of the database is on by default, and a portable mode keeps everything beside the executable.
Screenshots
Every image here is a capture of the app as it ships — nothing mocked, nothing planned. Click one to see it at full size.
Overview — the season, your numbers, what airs this week
Now Playing — an episode detected in mpv, the update counting down
Anime list, grid view
Anime list, rows — status, score and progress edited in place
Manga list, grid view
Local library — files matched to your list, next episode first
Statistics — overview
Statistics — genres and tags
Year in review
Seasonal
Calendar
Franchise graph
The bell — Karasu's and AniList's notifications in one stream
Command palette (Ctrl+K)
Settings — detection
Light theme
About
Platforms
Version 1.0.0, released 2026-09-05. Stable means in the current release and used every day by the maintainer; Experimental means in the release and built by CI, but not used every day.
An installer for 64-bit Windows. It is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may warn on first run; verify the download against the checksums if you like.
A sideloaded APK, Android 7 and up, signed with the project key so a newer one installs over the old. Take the arm64 build; universal is the fallback.
An AppImage for x86_64. It needs webkit2gtk-4.1 on the system (Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, Arch); make it executable and run it.
Updates: the desktop app follows the Stable channel by default and checks once a day; a Nightly channel with a build per commit is one switch away in Settings → Desktop → Updates. Every download is on the releases page.
AniList
Karasu is an independent, open-source project that talks to AniList's public API on your behalf. It is not made by AniList and not endorsed by it.
01Karasu
On your device. Reads and writes through the public GraphQL API.
02AniList's API
Signed in with the implicit OAuth grant — a token, never a password, and no client secret in the app.
03Your account
Your list lives on AniList. Karasu is a way of keeping it, not a copy of it.
Not a replacement
The website stays the place your list lives; Karasu reads the same list and writes to it.
The token stays in the backend
It is kept in your OS credential store (or an encrypted file in portable mode, or the Android Keystore) and is never handed back to the app's web view.
Within the limits
AniList allows about thirty requests a minute. Karasu batches, caches and never fetches on scroll, so the budget is spent on what you asked for.
New to AniList? It is a free anime and manga database and list at anilist.co. Karasu needs an account there to sync; without one it keeps a local list.
Open source
The whole of Karasu is on GitHub under the MIT licence — every commit, every decision, every measurement that shaped it. Developed with heavy AI assistance, and every change reviewed by a human maintainer before it lands.
Made with
FAQ
A desktop and Android app that keeps your AniList anime and manga list. It notices what you are playing or reading and updates your progress on AniList by itself, and it gives that list a fast local interface with statistics, notifications and the social pages.
Yes. Karasu is free of cost and released under the MIT licence. There is no paid tier and nothing to unlock.
Yes. The complete source is on GitHub, and every release is built there from a tagged commit.
A free anime and manga database and tracking site at anilist.co. Your list lives there; Karasu reads it and writes to it through AniList's public API.
No. It is a client for it. Your list stays on AniList and every change Karasu makes is visible on the website a moment later. You can also use Karasu without any account, with a local list only.
Windows and Android are Stable, Linux is an experimental AppImage, and there is no macOS build. Windows has every feature. Android has the list, statistics, notifications, widgets and the social pages, but no local library, no tray and no in-app updater. Detection differs: Windows reads media sessions, player and browser windows, mpv and Jellyfin; Linux reads media sessions, mpv and Jellyfin, with no window titles; Android reads Jellyfin.
It never sees your password. Signing in happens on anilist.co in your browser, which hands Karasu a token. That token is kept in your operating system's credential store on the desktop, in an encrypted file next to the app in portable mode, and in a Keystore-sealed file on Android — and it is never handed back to the app's web view.
Your list is cached locally, so it opens without a network, a title on it shows its cached page with a working +1, and edits are queued and sent when the connection returns. Browsing titles that are not on your list, search and the social pages need the network.
Yes, once an episode has played for two thirds of its length by default — or for the minutes you set, or after you confirm a toast, if you prefer to be asked. Progress only ever moves forward, and Karasu re-reads your list right before it writes.
No. It is an independent project using AniList's public API, with a registered client id and no special access.
The installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen has never seen it before and says so. Every release ships a SHA256SUMS.txt you can check the download against.
AniList's API and image servers; GitHub, for the update check and the download; the community's episode-relations data on GitHub, at most once a week; your own Jellyfin server if you set one up; Discord's local socket for Rich Presence if you enable it. Images in AniList user bios are fetched through Karasu's own bounded proxy, so those hosts learn your IP address when you open a profile. Nothing else, and no analytics.
Install Karasu, sign in on AniList once, and let the bird keep the list.
Current release 1.0.0 · 2026-09-05 · checksums
