Like many types of software, the selection of a favorite music player is, to some extent, dependent on personal preferences. But we hope our reviews of music players helps narrow the field.
All music libraries are different, and the right open source music player can make a world of difference – especially if you’ve a large collection.
We’ve reviewed the vast majority of music players for Linux. But there always seems more out there to explore.
hihat is software that’s billed as a minimalistic offline music player. It uses Electron, a framework designed to create desktop applications using web technologies that are rendered using the Chromium browser engine.
Installation
We tested hihat under Ubuntu 23.10 (and Manjaro).
Our Ubuntu test system needs npm installed. That’s the package manager for Node.js. Don’t install the package for npm in Ubuntu’s standard repositories. This only offers an old version of npm (version 9.2.0), but we need at least version 10.3.0 to install hihat with npm.
Before we can install npm, we first need to install node.js. Again don’t use Ubuntu’s standard repositories. We installed a more modern version of nodejs with the command:
$ curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_current.x | sudo -E bash - && sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
However, this still didn’t give a sufficiently modern version of npm (only npm 10.2.4). Let’s manually upgrade npm (npm cannot be installed without node.js)
$ curl -qL https://www.npmjs.com/install.sh | sudo sh
Now we can follow the instructions on hihat’s GitHub page.
$ sudo npm install npm@latest -g
Clone the repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/johnnyshankman/hihat.git
Change into the newly created directory.
$ cd hihat
Install the npm packages:
$ npm install
We can now run the app with the command:
$ npm run package
We also like to test software with Manjaro, an Arch-based distribution. One of the virtues of Arch is the Arch User Repository, user produced content consisting of package descriptions (PKGBUILDs) that allow you to compile a package from source with makepkg and then install it.
There’s a PKGBUILD for hihat in the AUR, and it installs without any shenanigans. That’s why Arch and Arch-based distros can be useful for testing software.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary