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Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS

(github.com)
198 points kushalpandya | 2 comments | 09 Jul 25 22:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.79s | source

I have a large collection of music files gathered over the years, so I was sorely missing a decent offline music player that can serve as a frontend for the collection. I tried several Mac apps over the years, but since streaming music is mainstream now, there aren't good offline music players that meet my needs. So I spent the last 3 months building Petrichor! The idea is to solve my problem and learn Swift UI development along the way, while giving back to the community with this open-source project! Here's a list of features it has, with more getting added in future;

- Everything you'd expect from an offline music player!

- Map your music folders and browse your library in an organised view.

- Create playlists and manage the play queue interactively.

- Browse music using folder view when needed.

- Pin anything (almost!) to the sidebar for quick access to your favourite music.

- Navigate easily: right-click a track to go to its album, artist, year, etc.

- Native macOS integration with menubar and dock playback controls, plus dark mode support.

- Search quickly through large libraries containing thousands of songs.

The app is still in alpha, so things may look unpolished, but I've been testing the alpha builds for the past few weeks and fixing issues as I find them for v1 release. I welcome any feedback (and contributions!) on GitHub repo. Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

1. Meekro ◴[10 Jul 25 09:05 UTC] No.44518911[source]▶
I've been searching for the perfect "old school iTunes" program for a while. I'm pretty sure it does not exist, maybe I'll try to make one someday unless someone beats me to it? Here's what I want:

* Smartlists, preferably with nested rules

* Proper search, the way iTunes did it: you have a huge excel-like list of songs that filters as you type

* Volume leveling

* Corresponding Windows/Mac/iPhone programs, with the ability to sync my collection like Dropbox

I would gladly pay $100 for this.

replies(1): >>44522321 #
2. kushalpandya ◴[10 Jul 25 15:48 UTC] No.44522321[source]▶
Smart playlists will be coming soon as I've done all the infra work to support it, in fact current default playlists that app has (Favourites, Top 25 Most Played, Top 25 Recently Played) use smart playlists behind the scenes, just that I don't have a UI to edit the rules yet.

Search should already be very fast (and filter through matches across any metadata field) as the app uses FTS5 on SQLite db to search tracks. But let me know if you still notice performance issues or bugs around it.

There might be iOS app in future but no plans for Windows app as that's a separate project of its own.

For cloud storage syncing, I did consider it at one point but then scope of this app would be very large, and there are plenty good apps to sync cloud storage data, like I personally use https://maestral.app/ for syncing Dropbox.