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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.

It's mostly that I want my own list management, key combinations, navigation, etc. Once the entire UI is my oyster, I realized I don't have to settle for how someone else decided to lay out the menus, etc. 25 years ago I would just learn all the key combos and be set, but 12 major iterations later, few to zero of those UI skills and muscle memory state has survived. So now, I can do my own and no one can take it away from me :)

I strongly recommend going this route (speaking from experience).

It is shockingly easy to build an opinionated UI for these things in a web browser. You need to implement m3u generation (or use a js web player), and some sort of hierarchical hyperlink based nav that matches your muscle memory. You should be able to use an existing service to grab cover art and metadata for newly ripped disks (unless those services disappeared over the years).

If you want to use a native GUI/TUI toolkit, I’d be shocked if an LLM had any trouble laying it out after a few rounds of refinement. (It definitely will not have any trouble doing this for web stuff.)

I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.

I absolutely love vlc

The iOS app is such a permanently buggy mess that I eventually had to bail after years of use with persistent issues that wouldn’t get fixed, and new bugs popping up. It can play hyper obscure formats, but the basic UI functions are very unstable

I constantly have trouble with VLC (long standing bugs, where it gets confused and fails to play audio after dvd menu clicks, etc).

I’ve had mixed luck getting llm’s to configure mpv (which involved writing lua or something for basic functionality!), but there are audio sync issues with it.

I miss the days when something like totem would just work and default to playing with deinterlacing and audio set correctly.

Configuring VLC is like solving a 200 variable boolean satisfiability problem or something. Also, the workarounds for core bugs come and go over time, so Reddit suggests toggling removed settings.

I think you must have very different needs if VLC is a substitute for iTunes/Music. For me, iTunes/Music is a music catalog app for managing my 9000+ MP3s with artists, album covers, playlisted based on various criteria, etc... where as VLC is an app for playing back single media files.

I manage my 9000+ MP3s with the filesystem. It has all the cover art, it's organized any way I want, and has playlists based on any criteria I want. Then I use any music player I want, and can drop the files onto any device I want.

What filesystem manages in multiple ways? Or are you using symlinks so you have one collection by artist, another by album, another by genre, another by year, etc...

I won’t say vlc is my favorite UI but it does all of this.

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