A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

[WalterBright]

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.

[livindub]

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

[pritambaral]

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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[yuhc]

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.

[zeruch]

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

[mdrzn]

Winamp?

[martpie]

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!

[mnd999]

See also clementine, which is the one I use.

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

[nullwarp]

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

https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

[rand0mx1]

Sayonara is also a good one.

https://sayonara-player.com/

[lalopalota]

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

https://musikcube.com/

[woodruffw]

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

[tambourine_man]

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 :)

[alisonatwork]

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.

[res0nat0r]

I still just use Winamp classic.

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

[indigodaddy]

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

[inshadows]

> A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

> electron-builder.yml

This is a joke, right?

[user3939382]

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

[xchip]

All was good until I realized it requires:

- Node.js

- Electron (formerly atom-shell)

- React.js

[dang]

"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

[cwyers]

`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?

[gchokov]

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

[butz]

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.

[sys_64738]

So a web browser engine to play music?

[cageface]

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

[ARandomerDude]

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