lowfi is a tiny rust app that serves a single purpose: play lofi. It'll do this as simply as it can: no albums, no ads, just lofi.

As of the 1.7.0 version of lowfi, all of the audio files embedded by default are from chillhop. Read MUSIC.md for more information.

I really hate modern music platforms, and I wanted a small, simple
app that would just play random ambient music without video and other fluff.

Beyond that, it was also designed to be fairly resilient to inconsistent networks, and as such it buffers 5 whole songs at a time instead of parts of the same song.

You'll need Rust 1.74.0+.

On MacOS & Windows, no extra dependencies are needed.

On Linux, you'll also need openssl & alsa, as well as their headers.

• alsa-lib on Arch, libasound2-dev on Ubuntu, alsa-lib-devel on Fedora.
• openssl on Arch, libssl-dev on Ubuntu, openssl-devel on Fedora.

Make sure to also install pulseaudio-alsa if you're using PulseAudio.

The recommended installation method is to use cargo:

cargo install lowfi

# If you want MPRIS support.
cargo install lowfi --features mpris

and making sure $HOME/.cargo/bin is added to $PATH. Also see Extra Features for extended functionality.

If you're struggling or unwilling to use cargo, you can just download the precompiled binaries from the latest release.

yay -S lowfi

zypper install lowfi

curl -sS https://debian.griffo.io/3B9335DF576D3D58059C6AA50B56A1A69762E9FF.asc | gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/debian.griffo.io.gpg
echo "deb https://debian.griffo.io/apt $(lsb_release -sc 2>/dev/null) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.griffo.io.list
sudo apt install -y lowfi

sudo dnf copr enable furqanhun/lowfi
sudo dnf install lowfi

This is good for debugging, especially in issues.

git clone https://github.com/talwat/lowfi
cd lowfi

# If you want an actual binary
cargo build --release --all-features
./target/release/lowfi

# If you just want to test
cargo run --all-features

lowfi

Yeah, that's it.

Bookmarks are lowfi's extremely simple answer to "what about if I'd like to save a track." You can bookmark/unbookmark tracks with b, and play them with lowfi -t bookmarks.

From a technical perspective, your bookmarks are no different to any other track list, and as such are also stored in the same directory.

If you have something you'd like to tweak about lowfi, you use additional flags which slightly tweak the UI or behaviour of the menu. The flags can be viewed with lowfi --help.

lowfi uses cargo/rust's "feature" system to make certain parts of the program optional, like those which are only expected to be used by a handful of users.

This feature provides the scrape command. It's usually not very useful, but is included for transparency's sake.

More information can be found by running lowfi help scrape.

Enables MPRIS. It's not rocket science.

This is only relevant to those using a custom track list, in which case it allows for more formats than just MP3. Those are FLAC, Vorbis, and WAV.

These should be sufficient for some 99% of music files people might want to play. If you are dealing with the 1% using another audio format which is in this list, open an issue.

lowfi also supports custom track lists, although the default one from chillhop is embedded into the binary.

To use a custom list, use the --track-list flag. This can either be a path to some file, or it could also be the name of a file (without the .txt extension) in the data directory.

For example, lowfi --track-list minipop would load ~/.local/share/lowfi/minipop.txt. Whereas if you did lowfi --track-list ~/Music/minipop.txt it would load from that specified directory.

All tracks must be in the MP3 format, unless lowfi has been compiled with the extra-audio-formats feature which includes support for some others.

In lists, the first line is what's known as the header, followed by the rest of the tracks. Each track will be first appended to the header, and then use the combination to download the track.

The exception to this is if the track name begins with a protocol like https://, in which case the base will not be prepended to it. If all of your tracks are like this, then you can put noheader as the first line and not have a header at all.

For example, in this list:

https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/
2023/06/Foudroie-Finding-The-Edge-V2.mp3
2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3
https://file-examples.com/storage/fe85f7a43b689349d9c8f18/2017/11/file_example_MP3_1MG.mp3

lowfi would download these three URLs:

• https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Foudroie-Finding-The-Edge-V2.mp3
• https://file-examples.com/storage/fe85f7a43b689349d9c8f18/2017/11/file_example_MP3_1MG.mp3
• https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3

Additionally, you may also specify a custom display name for the track which is indicated by a !. For example, if you had an entry like this:

2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3!custom name

Then lowfi would download from the first section, and display the second as the track name.

file:// can be used in front a track/header to make lowfi treat it as a local file. This is useful if you want to use a local file as the base URL, for example:

file:///home/user/Music/
file.mp3
file:///home/user/Other Music/second-file.mp3

Further examples can be found in the data folder.