I created kew, a music player for the Linux terminal.
This started when I asked myself: what if I could just type something like "play nirvana" in the terminal and have the rest taken care of automatically? That got the ball rolling and I kept adding stuff: covers in ascii and then as sixel images, a playlist view, a visualizer, a library view and finally search.
While kew can be used as a commandline tool, it has evolved into a TUI app.
Here are some example commands:
kew nirvana # Plays all of your Nirvana songs, shuffled
kew nevermind # Plays the "Nevermind" album in order
kew spirit # Plays "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
kew all # Plays all your music, shuffled
kew albums # Plays one album after the other in random order
It works best when your music library is organized like this: Artist/Album(s)/Track(s)
kew is written in C and licensed under GPLv2.
Source and screenshot: https://github.com/ravachol/kew
And I "compiled from source" as I am using Fedora, but it was just one command.
Thank you!
The aspect I like the most is using the filesystem as a database, since that's what UNIX people should like (and you can use symlinks for more complex cases). In fact, I myself made a music player with that as central philosophy, though it is much more bare/suckless compared to yours: https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus
Did you consider implementing a simple event system (maybe even IPC) for track and status change? Possibly MPRIS or something simpler. That was the main feature I kept from cmus when creating mus, so that I can easily interact with it through lemonbar and scripts.
Yes, MPRIS is supported.
% brew install kew
...
kew: Linux is required for this software.
Error: kew: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.
EDIT: Added.
It doesn't fit my use-case very well, though. I'm not saying it needs to, but I'm going to put my use-case out there in case someone is looking for project ideas.
We have oodles of music players on Linux, GUI and terminal. But we have very few choices that
* are optimized for the absurdly, comically large library of someone who has been diligently collecting and organizing music for decades
* collect playback statistics and allow user rating of songs
* that can be used to create smart playlists
I used amarok for years, but it keeps dying and reviving, and I don't trust it to stick around. I then used mpd for years, but while mpd excels at large libraries, the other two requirements have to be implemented client-side, and the experience was always at least a little janky. I currently use Strawberry, but 1) it chugs with a large library, 2) its smart playlists aren't expressive enough, and 3) it is also kind of janky, and I experience frequent crashes.
The only player I've found that really fits my use-case like a glove is MediaMonkey, but I walked away from Microsoft years ago, and I'm not about to go back now just to wrangle my music library.
As for your other two suggestions those fall outside the scope of kew. kew is supposed to be simple with minimal bloat.
1: https://www.navidrome.org/ 2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417
For an android client I use tempo[1] which again was one I landed on because pretty much all the other clients didn't support folder lookup either (I think dsub also does but tempo is a lot prettier).
[0] and also I think it's insane to add that much complexity to something that is single-user.
As you've said you just want a local application just wanted to mention that in case that's actually something that might also be useful for you.
Those who love this conceptually but have/had cloud music, did you act? How/why?
It works phenomenally.
At some point I was going to mirror it locally, but never got around to it.
It is all backed up in dropbox
Use whatever you want! Just wanted to suggest it.
I ended up switching to fully-local media after realizing that my 956GB flac+mp3 would be ~159GB when converted to Opus. I now use https://github.com/nvllsvm/harmonize to maintain a 128kbps Opus version of my main library and Syncthing to synchronize it to my phone and laptop.
--- side note, Auxio is the client I'm using on Android with my synced library.
[0] - https://musikcube.com/
So much thanks for giving a good example
I agree it's important. kew is so small it was pretty trivial to do.
int randomNumber = getRandomNumber(1, 808);
if (randomNumber == 808)
printGlimmeringText(text, nerdFontText, lastRowColor);
Is this a nix thing (i'm unsure what freeimage-unstable is)
error: Package ‘freeimage-unstable-2021-11-01’ in /nix/store/20yis5w6g397plssim663hqxdiiah2wr-source/pkgs/development/libraries/freeimage/default.nix:72 is marked as insecure, refusing to evaluate.
Known issues:
- CVE-2021-33367
- CVE-2021-40262
- CVE-2021-40263
- CVE-2021-40264
- CVE-2021-40265
- CVE-2021-40266
- CVE-2023-47992
- CVE-2023-47993
- CVE-2023-47994
- CVE-2023-47995
- CVE-2023-47996The version of kew packaged for Nix is very old: v1.5.2. We're at version 2.8.2. So it's more than a year old, from very early on in the project.
I don't know how relevant these vulnerabilities are to kew, which isn't run across the network in any way, it just reads your local files.
Thank you for bringing this to light. I don't know how feasible it is to use something other than freeimage though, gonna have to investigate.
sudo bash -c "curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ravachol/kew/main/install.sh | bash"