As somewhat of a Zune fanatic, it always makes me happy to see a new Metro-inspired UI, but every one of these Zune-inspired projects falls short when compared to the actual Zune application, which imo is the absolutely pinnacle of music players. It presents your music library in a way that to me is aesthetically pleasing and entirely intuitive. The three column layout, with sorting options for each, is ideal. Filtering does not dump you into a new page. It's hard to describe what makes it so pleasant to use, but no application I've found yet comes close.

I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.

The author has shared a behind-the-scenes look at the design journey, explaining the challenges and thought processes behind bringing this retro-inspired player to life, though in Chinese:

https://roriri.one/2024/10/04/rune/

My Zune HD from 2005/2006 still works. I think it's the oldest piece of functional tech I own. No, I don't use it on a daily basis. But I love booting it up every now and again.

It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.

Flutter plus Rust is the same stack I’m using for my music app.

Thanks to the awesome flutter_rust_bridge it’s very easy to use them together and leverage both their strengths.

https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge

I did not test this yet, but Dynamic "Mix" Feature and Audio Analysis and Recommendations, those are features I always wanted to have for a local music player. Amarok had some simple variant of this. Spotify of course has as well, but not really for local music.

That was the main reason I started my own music player project (https://github.com/albertz/music-player). But it never really got to the point to have a more advanced variant of this features. The best it could do is randomly play through directories, but at least prefer liked songs. I implemented the core playing engine in C++ and the remaining logic in Python, as I thought that would give me most flexibility. Unfortunately I haven't found the time to work on it since a while.

In a sea of streaming everything, it’s great to find pockets of local media players.

I’ve recently found myself experimenting with local playback and built https://github.com/xenodium/ready-player

While I used to stream music 100% of the time, that’s now more like 5%, dedicated exclusively to discovery.

These days, I’m now back to purchasing digital music and primarily local playback.

I realized that I don’t have a single mp3 on my machine these days. If I stop paying the bill I will have nothing to listen to. What have we done?

Dart and Rust mixed together. That's interesting. I'm wondering if Rust is needed for this application, couldn't everything technically done in Dart here?

Also I'd like to know more about the interop between Dart/Rust and what the experience is like!

This UI is absolutely gorgeous.

I wonder if any naming inspiration was taken from Roon, a very good music player.

Zune will never die. Long live Zune.

Gonna be confusing when I recommend Roon to people. They might think I’m talking about this.

Remember the zune tattoo?

Honestly, it looks super sleek and the README is a refreshing combination of briefness and useful info.

Wondering about more power-user features (as someone who did quodlibet -> mpd -> cmus -> my own https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus) such as gapless playback, ReplayGain, album instead of track shuffle, IPC and event reporting, possible headless mode, integration with projectM, etc...