Butterfly Player – Open-source music player for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Butterfly Player – Open-source music player for Windows

butterflyplayer.org

46 pointsnvr8249 comments

OP should add "Windows only" in the title.

Butterfly is developed on 64 bit Windows 8.1 Professional. However, it's actively tested on Windows 7, both 32 and 64 bit versions. Windows XP or Windows Vista are not supported. There will not be a Linux version of Butterfly, please don't ask about it.

why exactly?

I thought it was trying to be an OSS, cross platform Foobar2k until I saw the platform disclaimer. IMO Foobar solved the music player problem on Windows a good while ago.

For me Winamp 2.9x did that already very long ago.

For me it was foobar2000 because it supported Unicode and ReplayGain looooong before Winamp.

Hey, it has great platform support! It's tested on both 32 AND 64-bit versions of Windows 7!

Just don't use any other platform, including earlier versions of Windows. LOL

I'm a bit puzzled by the use of "blazingly fast" to describe a music player, as typical PC CPUs have been powerful enough to decode audio formats like MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc., for a long time - I remember listening to MP3s with WinAmp on a Pentium 200 and had no problems with that. Given the low resource requirements of the task, the fact that this player is Windows 7/8 only is even more odd.

Perhaps they just meant, "Compared to the other ones you're probably using"? Because I know iTunes is legitimately starting to give me problems, despite my Mac only being a few years old. Naturally, Apple is trying to cram a ton of crap into iTunes, when all I want is to be able to play music and make some playlists. I would gladly switch if there was something fast and with as low a barrier to entry.

> "Compared to the other ones you're probably using"?

mpd, vlc, rythmbox. all of them are "blazingly fast" tbh...

I'm assuming this is referring to the UI.

If anybody here looking for a cross-platform foobar-like player try DeaDBeeF: http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ Also available on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.deadbeef.a...

It's not exactly cross-platform, as it doesn't support neither OSX nor Windows.

I think it is worth mentioning that DeaDBeeF is also one of the few players which has support for OPUS.

I have been using billy (http://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html).

Also fast, small. But only support FLAC, MP3, WAV, OGG and Windows. Unfortunately, the download is offline.

I was able to find it a few months back by poking around on archive.org

I had a copy on my computer http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1753596/billy104k.zip

I don't know if you are the author but if you want to auto-evaluate yourself have a look on:

http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html

Less than 200Kb, lightning fast. IMHO it's difficult to make better than this. If you install (manually) the Bass library (100Kb) you can even play web radio. The only "issues" are: not open source and windows only. You can start to improve there if you want to get more than a toy app. Hope it helps somehow.

Looks good. But I'm still looking for a player that could be as compact and unobtrusive as Winamp: squashed into a tiny playback bar I could pop open to peek at some setting and a tiny playback queue window to the side I could dock with it, or turn off, stretch out long separate from the playback controls so I could see what was coming up, or just pick something coming later down the line.

In this case, if there was a "tiny" mode that merged play/pause, and put it, stop, next, previous (and maybe shuffle) into the title bar. Changed the title to the current track, then had maybe a "show playlist" pop down I could toggle, then got rid of the entire rest of the UI or buried behind a "more stuff" button. I'd be happy.

Any reason you don't just use Winamp?

They might not know it changed hands again and is being maintained.

Nightingale [1] is a community-supported fork of Songbird (development of songbird is discontinued). It has a bar-like "mini player" mode. Size and functionality (and availability) of that mode depend on the skin selected, but in general there are buttons for prev,pause,next track, volume control, current trackname, length and current position. It does not have a separate playlist though, but double clicking it brings you back to the itunes-like "main player" mode.

The mini player is still somewhat bulky, for my taste. I remember Songbird had some skins, that made it even slimmer. I fixed this for me with a small AutoIT script, that fades the player to 10% transparancy when the mouse is not hovering on top of it.

[1] http://getnightingale.com/

Why distributing source code in a zip and not putting it on GitHub or any other similar service?

I'm the author. I know it's quite lame, that the source code is not on Github. It will be.

It's actually not really lame at all, after all this is open sourced. I guess people want the chance to contribute to the project (or to fork it).

P.S. I'm also curious as to why folks are downvoting those who are asking about Github!

I didn't downvote, but... It's actually pretty irritating that discussion of any project not hosted on GH gets "Why not Github?" question, every single f-ing time. I hope this will end, together with LinkedIn invites.

In this case, there was no repo at all. That's why he was asked.

It was more of a genuine question than of a criticism. There are obvious advantages about having a public repository if one is distributing the source code. But there might be disadvantages too, even as little as the setup time. I should have made the question more explicit.

For Linux, I've always been using MOC [1]. Lightweight, supports all the formats I need, and has a great console UI.

[1]: http://moc.daper.net/

I'm currently using Quod Libet on XFCE/debian, anyone who can suggest a better player (e.g. one that supports actual playlists) let me know! (small and fast is important.)

(I could use VLC, but manually managing playlists as files is too fiddly, esp when there's no library and you must go find the actual music file to drag.)

Fair play to these guys, a blazingly fast music player can be made a much simpler task by sticking to one platform.

Have a look into mpd and ncmpcpp. It's about as good as it gets, once you've learnt which keys to press.

I would never have thought of using a music player that worked like that - hacker-esque, for sure.

Thanks, I'll give it a go :)

update: Quod Libet totally has playlists, if you know where to find them (try right clicking on a song.)

In OSX I just use afplay. Lowest CPU/battery consumption ever. I made a simple ruby gem that uses it for playing random / specific music on your /Music folder: http://rubygems.org/gems/gramola It does the trick for me: "just play music while I code and save me some battery". Hope somebody else finds it useful :)

Looks fairly good! ( I'm all OS X though :| )

If it's got Gapless Playback, definitely list that as a feature!

If this is GPL, why not host it on Github?

Hmmm... downvoted?

I didn't downvote you, but you probably got downvoted for perpetuating 'free software == on github'

Well, the assumption that I'm perpetuating it is on them then. I could have said "why don't you setup a git repo", but then again the easiest way of doing this would be via Github - which is a low barrier to entry.

Or they could use any of the other git repo hosting services out there. But, in my experience, GitHub is the easiest to use. A bit silly to downvote for that reason though, if that's the case.

I don't think Github is evil (yet). The fast and easy way to delete an account there is too transparent. They don't have also a strong competitor, neither weak points to be explored by a new player. We'll enjoy the status quo for some time: Google, Facebook, Microsoft all gave in to Github.

> They don't have also a strong competitor

BitBucket is a good underdog IMHO. I use it for all my private projects or stuff I don't want out in the open just yet since they offer unlimited free private repositories.

It's rather nice to be honest.

They support Mercurial if you're into that as well.

Blazingly fast for using windows audio api? Or own engine?

> There will not be a Linux version of Butterfly, please don't ask about it.

WTF?

This simply tells me that the developers are not actually skilled in programming.

Oh... Wrong. Not everything needs to be cross platform. I wanted to make a native Windows program using C++ and WTL/Winapi. It has nothing to do with skills in programming. The only reason I did not make a Linux version of Butterfly is because I didn't want to. I've done portable programs for years. I use Linux every single day on my laptop. I don't even know why I'm trying to explain. Butterly is open source, GPL and can be used for free of charge. It's available for platforms I want it to be available. Feel free to create versions for other platforms or use some other music player that works on the operating system you want.

Agreed. Ignore the ignorance of the GP, open source coding is often done to scratch an itch - if Windows frameworks and platforms are your thing then more power to you!

Can it play web radio, i.e. shoutcast streams?

no. I installed it, but there's no way to input a url.

> There will not be a Linux version of Butterfly, please don't ask about it.

Moving along...

I can't respect a player with "Gun N Roses" in the screenshot.

What the fuck is windows

there is no linux version

Reply on news.ycombinator.com