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198 points kushalpandya | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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!

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dewey ◴[] No.44517016[source]
If you are looking for a “old school iTunes” kind of player there’s also https://swinsian.com/
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atoav ◴[] No.44521033[source]
A friend of mine (sound engineer) has been using VLC player for audio playback since forever. I do the same.

The advantage is that you are forced to organize your music in your file system and that translates incredibly well to all other future systems. Want a special playlist? Just copy the files over and name them with a numeric prefix counting up. You can open that playlist ten years later on a different operating system.

Since I tend to listen to full albums, this has been a good way of doing things.

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1. dewey ◴[] No.44521291[source]
There’s a reason library based players were invented and that’s that you don’t need to batch rename files, or tag a file 3 times if it’s part of 3 different playlists.
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2. atoav ◴[] No.44529840[source]
I didn't claim there was no reason.