If you’re all about your local music and don’t want any sort of streaming service or cloud integration, pitch up a tent and check out Festival, a new cross-platform, open-source music player written in Rust and leveraging Symphonia.
The ‘unique’ user-interface won’t suit everyone’s tastes. But in terms of functionality Festival does everything a music player needs to (with a few minor exceptions).
Plus, Festival is blazingly fast — even when processing substantial local music collections. Files, folders, tags, artwork all blink into view instantaneously. Memory usage during playback (on my system) was on par with Rhythmbox, so it’s not quite the lightweight dream – but it’s more nimble than Spotify et al.
I’ve written about a lot of music players over the years – you’ve no doubt read about a lot. Suffice to say there’s no shortage. But while almost all such apps do the same core thing (i.e. play music), differentiation is made through features, integrations, presentation, management etc.
Festival is no different.
Festival Music Player
Firstly, the UI is opinionated. It doesn’t conform to modern GUI app sensibilities. But I kinda like it; it reminds me of awesome CLI music players like Musikcube and CMUS, but without using an actual TUI. The UI is text heavy but it is point and click (keyboard shortcuts are also supported).
Secondly, Festival makes importing and playing the headline attraction. You won’t get sidetracked editing metadata, compiling playlists, or hooking up Last.fm — none of those capabilities are present. You simply point the app at your music directories, scan, then use “artists” or “albums” to find something to play.
Viewing an album shows you the tracking listing. Click on a track to play, or right-click a track to add it to the queue. MPRIS integration is present (hallelujah), and there’s an in-app volume bar to adjust the audio volume.
Search is functional, but the “songs” view is a little overwhelming for me. Akin to a spreadsheet with poorly distributed column widths (which are resizable). Alas, I couldn’t find a way to hide specific columns. Given all my music in ~/Music I don’t need to see file location, etc.
A dizzying array of settings are available, most focused on sort order for the various views. There’s also a slider to adjust the size of album art shown in the grid; various arrangements of text for the titlebar; conferrable accent colours, and a lot more.
A few drawbacks: it doesn’t seem to handle compilations well so if have a lot of those in your library be prepared for splintering; it also sometimes stutters during playback. I don’t see a CPU or memory spike when this happens, though so it may be a “me” issue. There’s no app icon (yet).
In all, Festival is a refreshing change of pace when it comes to music players. It’s not going to win £50 in a beauty contest (Monopoly reference there, for no reason) but who stares at their music player long-term anyway?
You can grab pre-built packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux (in the form of an AppImage) from the Festival GitHub releases page. The app is also in the AUR for those of you using an Arch-based distro or making use of those new-fangled hybrid package manager things.
