Slick! I love it.

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.

I love the idea. My music is now 50% cloud only, 50% on disk. I mean, its 100% in the cloud, i just have local files for half available. Ive been thinking about self hosting some music provider thingy (or even just supporting ssh via my dyndns-like capability) to my NAS and bringing music back to self owned files. However, it is work to do when the internet is pretty reliable, costs are low, etc.

Those who love this conceptually but have/had cloud music, did you act? How/why?

This is exactly what I was looking for! I actually started writing something myself.

And I "compiled from source" as I am using Fedora, but it was just one command.

Thank you!

I love the readme, and I wish that every project had one this great. And it player looks awesome as well!

mpv --vo=caca

It's is pretty cool, I can feel the energy poured into making your personal computing experience more seamless! Though the first thing I wondered when reading your examples is "how is ambiguity resolved?". Like albums, artists and tracks having the same string or sharing a prefix (search in this specific order, I guess?); or artists having the exact same name.

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.

Requires Debian 13?

brew install failed on macos

% brew install kew

...

kew: Linux is required for this software.

Error: kew: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.