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Jolteon

The best music player for local files.

File Browser - Light Theme File Browser - Dark Theme File Browser - Search

Table of contents

  1. About
  2. Installation
  3. Features
  4. Supported Audio Formats
  5. Customization
  6. Performance
  7. Philosophy
  8. Contributing
  9. Bugs

About

Jolteon, the best music player for local files.

Warning: this project is under heavy development.

Installation

Tested only on Linux

Build From Source

Right now, this is the only option.

You'll need rust nightly.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/lautarodragan/jolteon.git
cd jolteon
cargo run --release

Upcoming

  • Binaries automatically built and published here, in the GitHub repo
  • Automatic updates

Features

  • Media library
    • Search/Filter in the artist list. Just start typing. Press Esc to clear the filter.
    • Soon, full-library search will be added. The only challenge here is coming up with great UI and UX for this feature — the code itself is simple and most of what's needed is already implemented.
  • Playlists
    • Deleted playlist are soft-deleted, not truly deleted. The playlist graveyard can be opened and closed with F8.
  • File Browser
    • Search/Filter in File Browser (Ctrl+F)
  • Playing Queue
  • .cue sheet file support
  • .jolt files to override audio metadata non-destructively
  • Controls
    • Play/Pause
    • Seek 5 seconds forward/backward
    • Media keys Play/Pause support via MPRIS in Linux
  • Gapless playback
  • Persist app state:
    • The current directory of the browser
    • The queue
    • Current song (coming soon)
  • Safe handling of application crashes, restoring the terminal to its normal state, thread hygiene (all threads joined on exit)
  • A clock on the top bar :)

Upcoming

Virtual directories in media library.

Displaying music by artist, album, track number and song title is generally more desirable than navigating the file system, but, sometimes, being able to manually structure and organize music beyond its metadata is convenient.

Personally, I prefer having all soundtracks under an OST folder, rather than mixed with bands. Same goes for "classic" music, or interpreted music in general (as opposed to original compositions).

There's no real reason not to support both approaches at once, by organizing music files by metadata but allowing grouping by virtual directories, which would enable things like:

  • Interpreted
    • Bach
  • Modern
    • The Doors
    • Pink Floyd
      • The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
      • The Dark Side of the Moon
      • Wish You Were Here
  • Soundtracks
    • Cowboy Bebop
    • Ry Cooder - Crossroads

Album Covers

Kitty supports full-resolution, full-color images. It shouldn't be particularly hard to add this feature.

I'll have to figure out the best UI and UX for this, and probably make it optional/configurable.

Themes

See dedicated section down below.

Supported Audio Formats

The following formats should work: aac, flac, mp3, mp4, m4a, ogg, wav.

Jolteon uses Rodeo to play music, with the symphonia backend.

I mainly use flac files, and some mp3. Other formats aren't usually tested.

Codec Issues

So far, I've only found one issue with one flac file, which fails to perform seeks, and, after a few seconds of playback, causes the cpal thread to panic, crashing Jolteon. This same file does run well with mpv. It does report errors reading it, but it still recovers well from them, and is able to seek without issues.

I tried switching the flac backend, but got even worse results. I looked into using libmpv and libavcodec, which, in my mind, are pretty much guaranteed to be more stable, but switching to them is far from trivial.

Figuring out the specific bug in the flac codes built in pure Rust is probably an easier and more reasonable path forward.

And Jolteon shouldn't crash if the audio playback crashes, but that's a story for another day.

Customization

Theme

Right now, the theme is built into the binary (see assets/theme.toml). Soon, more built-in themes will be added, as well as support for custom ones.

Future Configuration Options

There aren't any other configuration options available right now, but I have a few in mind:

  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Texts (translations)
  • Clock show/hide
  • Clock format
  • Maybe some degree UI layout.

Performance

I don't bench-mark Jolteon, but I do use it many hours, every day, and the release build always stays at .5-2% of my CPU, and usually 0% RAM (yes, that's a zero). I manually compare this to mpv and the numbers seem to match, and my machine is 6+ years old, so I'm happy with it. Specially considering RustRover and Chrome consume orders of magnitude more, permanently.

I haven't experienced any issues with the audio performance itself, but this is handled by symphonia and cpal, so there isn't a lot Jolteon can do to break it. Same goes for the UI, which is managed by Ratatui.

If you do experience any sort of performance issues — be it choppy UI, keyboard input response, choppy audio, or significantly higher CPU/RAM usage than mpv or any other well-known media player for the same file, please open an issue reporting it. Being able to reproduce this with an audio file available in the public domain, or with a license that permits sharing it, would be ideal, even if hard or very unlikely.

Philosophy

  • Support features, UI and UX similar to cmus
  • Statically linked, dependency free, single file binary that anyone can just download, chmod a+x and run.

History & Rant

See HISTORY.md.

Developing

Rust is very friendly language —even to newcomers—, and has a very friendly community.

If you're new to Rust, I encourage you to give it a try. The Rust Book is pretty awesome, and, for slightly more advanced topic of threading, Mara Bos's Rust Atomics and Locks is a great resource.

To install Rust and Cargo, see https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install or https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html. Under macOS, Linux, etc, it's just copy-pasting a curl ... command. I won't copy it here for safety reasons.

To get started with Jolteon, just clone the repo and then run the project:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/lautarodragan/jolteon.git
cd jolteon

cargo run

You may need to install libasound2-dev:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

Check out the GitHub workflows for CI/CD for more details on what to do to get Jolteon to run and build.

I try to keep the source code as clean and intuitive as I can, so modifying it should be (hopefully) relatively easy. I'll add an ARCHITECTURE.md soon-ish, which should make the source code friendlier to navigate.

Keep in mind I'm using my own fork of cpal right now. I have an open PR for cpal, with a small bugfix, that hasn't been merged yet.

Bugs

See BUGS.md.