A simple, clean and cross-platform music player | Hacker News Reader

A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

github.com

50 pointssdevonoes57 comments

All I ask of a music player is to give it a directory with all the music files in it, and then say "play shuffle". That's it.

Sadly, the only player which will do that is Microsoft Media Player. All the others suffer from one fault or another which causes it to fail:

1. requires installing some third party "server" because sharing the directory isn't enough. The "server" then proceeds to consume all the resources of your computer, regardless of whether it is serving or not. I presumed it was trying to copy all my files to the NSA. What else would it be doing with disk drive light on all the time? for days?

2. does not look at subdirectories. Your music all has to be in one top-level folder.

3. randomly hangs and scrambles its music database (better keep a backup!)

4. hangs if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files

5. if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files, it only plays the first N files

6. displays the bit rate of the file being played. Does not display the name, artist, or album.

7. hangs if the USB stick is a large capacity one

I've tried PC software, Linux software, two different Roku media players (including the default one), 4 different internet radios that promised to play media files from a USB device

So what do I use? Microsoft Media Player.

The only one that actually worked was the Turtle Beach Audiotron, until they went out of business which bricked it, because naturally the device was designed to phone home to Turtle Beach and crash if nobody picked up, even to play local music files.

Have you looked at foobar2k yet? https://www.foobar2000.org/

It's nicely bare-bones. I drag my music folder into it, hit Sort > Randomize, hit play, minimize to tray. Then music comes out.

I've used mpd since my early college years, often in shuffle mode. Always works. None of the issues you describe.

I'm also confident VLC should work, but I haven't tried it for this purpose (because mpd never gave me a reason to), and I'm sure you've tried that already.

Heck, Roku doesn't even work. They've sold what, a million of those Roku boxes? For years? And their !@#$%^&* music player does not work, and never has.

I think it was VLC on Ubuntu that would randomly delete or corrupt its music database. I kept having to rebuild it. The VLC support people told me I was just imagining this :-/

I don't bother filing bug reports anymore on any product (other than D Foundation things), as never in 40 years has that ever produced a positive result. Open source, closed source, makes no difference. I just complain on HN :-)

Winamp?

Bro there aren't many players that can't do this... This is a fundamental feature of tens of standalone music players. You just need to explore more than Roku or any other streaming service.

I'd say either VLC or Musicolet let you do that as well.

Creator of Museeks here, a little late for the party. There are many comments in this thread, and the usual electron-bashing we're all used to at this point, so I'll just make a few points:

- I know all the cons of using Electron, thank you

- I started writing this piece of software 8 years ago, for me, to learn horizontal software development (ui, db, releases, binaries, cd, testing, etc), at a time I dropped out from university and I had to learn stuff in order to find a job and pay my rent

- Nowadays, I still use this project to experiment with technologies I want to learn or play with

- I truly don't care you don't like it (the app, or electron itself), my only purpose is to share something solving a real problem for me, for free

- If this app is useful to only one person other than me, and angers the HN crowd, I'll still be happy about it, and it will still be worth the hundreds or thousand hours I put on this

cheers, and happy coding!

See also clementine, which is the one I use.

https://www.clementine-player.org/

Also Strawberry which, in my experience, is slightly better in supported features

https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

Strawberry is a still active and maintained fork of Clementine.

wish we had a still-active and maintained fork of winamp :/

I just want a little 3 box thing with whats playing, my EQ, and my playlist, on a native TUI/GUI. Everything now is so greedy for space.

Audacious fits the bill.

I was using it for some time before realising you can switch to the Winamp interface (and load skins!)

Is there a release for MacOS?

Qmmp, which is similar, doesn't seem to be packaged for MacOS on its homepage, but it can be installed using brew.

https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index.php

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/qmmp#default

Thanks!

There is one in ports: https://ports.macports.org/port/audacious/

FWiW and For General Info::

Winamp 5.9 Final Released (26th July 2022)

> This is the culmination of 4 years' work since the 5.8 release. > Two dev teams, and a pandemic-induced hiatus period inbetween.

> To the end-user, it might not seem like there's a whole heap of changes, but the largest and hardest part was actually migrating the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting it all to build successfully.

> The groundwork has now been laid, and now we can concentrate more on features. Whether fixing/replacing old ones or adding new.

[more] http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=458120

[direct D/L] https://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/Winamp590_9999_f...

Thanks

I use musikcube - terminal based, cross platform, just plays tunes.

https://musikcube.com/

Sayonara is also a good one.

https://sayonara-player.com/

I tried many players and was using Strawberry lately because it is pretty light and has nice features.

But, it was good for music only, not for radio and other audio files.

I have never seen anything about Sayonara before but tried it after your post. Thank you.

It's lighter, more feature-full and I can let go ofStrawberry, MPV and Goodvibes.

It won't be applicable to everyone, but I want to give a plug to Sonixd[1]: it's a Subsonic client, meaning that it'll work with Subsonic or any other music server that uses the Subsonic API (Navidrome, Airsonic, gonic).

It's an Electron application, which won't be for anyone, but it's sufficiently smooth and snappy for me.

[1]: https://github.com/jeffvli/sonixd

I’ve been dreaming of developing something very close to this: a clone of late 2000s iTunes in Electron.

But it’s essential for me that it imports Apple Music (née iTunes) Library.xml with all the play counts, etc.

If you manage to implement this feature, I’m in :)

MusicBee can import iTunes libraries. It's a solid player that provides a lot of customizability in its front end. It's especially good for tagging and organizing your music just how you like.

Thanks, but Windows only and closed source.

I still just use Winamp classic.

https://winamp-classic.en.softonic.com/

This has been around for a long time apparently. It first hit AUR in 2016: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/museeks-bin

> A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

> electron-builder.yml

This is a joke, right?

cmus broke at some point but I really liked it. It was pretty sweet paging through song lists at 1M mph

All was good until I realized it requires:

- Node.js

- Electron (formerly atom-shell)

- React.js

What’s your recommendation for cross-platform app development these days?

Not the guy and I don't have a beef with nodejs et all, but Qt(framework) C#/Python

Has Qt improved its aethetics/appearance? My experience with Qt apps is that they have a distinctive non-native look and feel that's a bit off-putting to me.

Same problem with node / electron though. It generally looks nothing like the native UI, and has a ridiculous memory footprint.

While I prefer native apps, I’m fine with electron and web apps as long as the ui is good to use and to look at.

Some electron apps are great to use, many have terrible UIs. But in my experience all Qt apps are ugly. I was wondering if Qt has been working on improving that.

I'm a bit bewildered by these memory complaints. RAM usage on desktop applications hasn't been an issue for 20ish years. Open up your process manager once in a while.

It is an issue on machines with 2GB of ram or lower.

And there is no good reason we should throw away those perfectly working machines just because devs are lazy waste creators and global warming mothafokers.

What does look like the native UI? I'm not a Mac user so maybe that platform has some uniformity? Windows is a total mish-mash and just about every app and utility for the past 20 years (even MS Office) has had its own "skin". On Linux, Gnome and KDE constantly redesign things, and every distro is different, so there isn't really a standard. The only things I can think of that are consistent are the utilities that come with the DE, but most of the apps I use on Linux are either browsers or IDEs, each with their own style, or console stuff (and even then, the UX varies!)

Lazarus. Native fast compact code that compiles from small ARM boards to big PCs.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I usually go for the newest (often disappointed to find I was too early). So right now that for me would be .NET MAUI[0] and Flutter.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33523532

Fyne Toolkit

I came here to comment that exactly. I am not installing anything Electron on any of my machines .. not anymore.

Why's that?

Installation bloat mostly.

I came here to read comments of the token Electron complainers accompanying every thread like this.

At least they have been experimenting with Tauri: https://github.com/martpie/museeks/discussions/639 .

With File System Access API this probably can be a simple web app, no need for wrapper. File support might get shorter, though.

So a web browser engine to play music?

Yes. Just to play music.

`Electron (formerly atom-shell)`

This made me laugh. Is there anyone in 2022 who doesn't know what Electron is, but does know about atom-shell?

I've been working on something similar. It's currently in electron but I'm working on porting it to tauri since I agree that ideally you'd want a music player to be lighter on system resources than electron apps are. So far the tauri version uses a small fraction of the ram and disk space.

https://github.com/milesegan/minimoon

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did look at the project, and it didn't mention it was a leaning exercise, then, pointing out that requiring a gig of dependencies is questionable is reasonable.

It's a repetitive trope complaint that is reducible to "I don't like these things". Not liking these things is reasonable but it's bad HN commentary because generic repetition is bad HN commentary.

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