New Project: Sparkplayer

What is Sparkplayer?

Sparkplayer is a media player in your terminal, written in Rust and using Ratatui. It's meant to "just work" with no special setup or extra steps. You just run it and it will default to playing the files in your Music directory. The files to be played back are managed in a playlist and the program supports exporting and importing of playlists. There's a number of fun visualizers, and the player will display album art as per terminal capabilities. It also plays video files.

What about video?

Video support includes all major formats and codecs. If your terminal supports graphics, the video will be rendered in a graphical section in your terminal. If no graphics are supported, the video will be rendered using ASCII characters. You can also switch to a fullscreen video view that uses SDL. Of course multiple audio tracks and subtitles are supported as well.

How can I install this?

If you're an arch linux user, just run yay -S sparkplayer or paru -S sparkplayer to install it from the AUR. Packages for other linux distros and operating systems such as Windows are available at the github page.

Why not just use VLC?

Truth be told, there's a lot of terminal-based media players. However some of them were cumbersome to install or use, looked boring, or didn't support all the formats I wanted. And then there's VLC, which is a fantastic program but it drives me crazy: Whenever playing .mp3 or .ogg files, it would subtly shift the pitch during playback, especially on playback start or after scrolling. It even does this on the Android version of VLC. I have tried every option available, but was unable to get this behavior to stop. So here we are.

I don't want/can't install anything

You can run sparkplayer in a webbrowser by visiting https://sparkplayer.playspoon.com/