A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp (opens in new tab)

I remember with nostalgia the mp3blaster. I spent years listening to it in my terminal. At one point I used only cli without graphical desktop on slackware and one of my TTYs was dedicated to it.

Turns out these times are forever gone - never to come back. The huge disappointment when I tried this on the first run to play a mp3 file from my local disk and it initiated outbound connection. Why a local CLI player needs outbound TCP connection to play a local file from my local disk?!?! The answer was in the source. It is called telemetry. Back then when I used mp3blaster we used to call this spyware, but the times had changed since then.

Telemetry on by default in a CLI app seems very weird

Winamp was pretty cool. When I switched to Linux, many years ago, I wanted to have winamp too. I think I used bmp for a while until it died; before that xmms but that one also sort of died.

Meanwhile some other GUI showed up, I forgot the name. I kind of gave up on winamp, mostly because my use cases shifted. I went to mplayer, then mpv, and now I am too used to using mpv for literally anything related to audio and video (which in turn uses ffmpeg of course). I kind of built a commandline helper variant that just plays anything I have local - audio, video. I could probably go and find a nice UI again, and that may have advantages such as simply scrolling through the list or setting ad-hoc favourites, but I don't quite need it anymore; I am faster with the keyboard too, so my use cases changed. To play all audio from Hans Zimmer, for instance, I may type "rsong Zimm" or something like that. (I also alias a lot so I may just type "zimmer" instead, but most of the time if I use it I just have it default to random selection as I don't care what is played normally.)

Like others the telemetry is hugely undesirable nor necessary. Likewise if they truly don't collect your IP as they claim it's just ripe for endless abuse.

For a terminal music player I like termusic, which is somewhat similar to mp3blaster, which I sorely miss.

https://github.com/tramhao/termusic

The not so good parts are 1) it is written in Rust and therefore packaging is awful with a lot of dependencies; 2) it repeats playlists by default with no option (so far) to turn that off. But there's an issue open on it and it looks like this is going to be fixed.

This is cool! I wanted to make a basic CRUD form to update meta data and was considering go, lots of neat libraries to take a look at.

Interesting that it uses charmbracelet libraries to create the terminal components. I often have a hard time understanding how to use charmbracelet effectively, for minor TUI things I prefer tview more.

Anyone know any good tutorials/blog posts about building something complicated with bubble tea? I feel like the charmbracel docs are way too "happy path" if that makes sense?

I’ve been using this in Omarchy, it’s really great - easy to use and can do any songs or playlist on YouTube, so I’ll pipe through those programming concentration playlists without visiting YouTube.

Looks great and bring backs a lot of memories... I had to go back to https://skins.webamp.org/ for a nostalgia shot.

I wish music had not move to stream, I think I appreciated each song much more when listening did not feel like such an ephemeral experience.

Just installed this, loving it so far! Thank you!

This is great, all I wanted from music player! I've used cmus last few years but it has some warts and UX downsides.

Should have called it clamp

As someone who is fond of Windows music players and futuristically designed DIN stereos of the early-to-mid 2000s, the variety of console visualizations is wicked cool and very much welcome! This is easily the best feature of cliamp. I'd love the collection of visualizations as a separate program, akin to cava[1], that listens and responds to your default audio sink. I already use a Raspberry Pi for music while driving, so I'm already thinking about displaying these visualizations on my car's infotainment screen somehow.

As a friendly request, I'd love to be able to use up and down keys to seek one minute forward or backward during playback, like with mpv. I play a lot of mixes that are an hour or longer in length, so this functionality would be a nice-to-have. I'll likely submit this idea to GitHub, anyhow.

To share some honest criticism, I was disappointed to discover built-in telemetry. Although it can be disabled with a flag, I dislike how it's enabled by default and unknown to the user unless one specifies the -h flag. I don't understand why user diagnostics data is needed from a console music player. Make this anti-feature opt-in and instead rely primarily on bug reports, or make the user aware of this telemetry upon initial invocation and provide instructions on how to disable it. Constructively, know your audience.

But overall, thank you to all the maintainers for this cool software!

[1]: https://github.com/karlstav/cava

The project is cool, the demo song is iconically AI not great, sorry.

Imagine telling your AI to include unsecured telemetry… all im the namesake of mother Russia and father China. Wait no, that’s the wrong message.

Of course for the terminal. GUIs never developed, as we still live in the 1970s.