from Hacker News

A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

by sdevonoes on 11/13/22, 6:45 PM with 57 comments

• by WalterBright on 11/14/22, 1:09 AM

  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.

• by martpie on 11/21/22, 1:58 PM

  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!

• by mnd999 on 11/13/22, 8:19 PM

  See also clementine, which is the one I use.

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

• by woodruffw on 11/13/22, 10:58 PM

  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

• by tambourine_man on 11/13/22, 9:41 PM

  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 :)

• by res0nat0r on 11/13/22, 11:55 PM

  I still just use Winamp classic.

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

• by indigodaddy on 11/13/22, 7:50 PM

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

• by inshadows on 11/15/22, 6:13 PM

  > A simple, clean and cross-platform music player

  > electron-builder.yml

  This is a joke, right?

• by user3939382 on 11/14/22, 1:37 AM

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

• by xchip on 11/13/22, 8:08 PM

  All was good until I realized it requires:

  - Node.js

  - Electron (formerly atom-shell)

  - React.js