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. But what if you fancy listening to something not in your collection, and you don’t want to pay to access a streaming service.
You might want to consider Lofi, a large catalog from over 300 musicians. The catalogue consists of ambient music designed for chilling, sleeping, and working.
lowfi is billed as an extremely simple lofi player. It runs in your terminal with a TUI. It’s free and open source software.
Installation
We evaluated lowfi using the Manjaro and Ubuntu 24.10 distributions.
With Manjaro, Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool) lets us install lowfi from the Arch User Repository.
The software builds with no issues.
lowfi is cross-platform software. Besides Linux, it runs under macOS and Windows.
In Operation
Here’s what you see at startup. We can skip to the next track, pause playback and quit the program. There’s no option to seek within a track, or skip back a track.
There are various keyboard shortcuts such as the ability to change the playback volume (including left and right arrows).
With the default width the full name of the track is often not displayed. Let’s use the -w flag to set a wider width.
There’s support for MPRIS so you can control it with software like playerctl. This lets you run lowfi in the background without using its TUI.
lowfi also supports custom track lists, although the default one from Lofi Girl is embedded into the binary.
Summary
lowfi is an extremely simple player for ambient songs. This is not a general purpose music player.
The fact there’s no option to seek or listen to a previous track isn’t important. The whole point of ambient music is to help you relax. It’s great for late night background music. Give it a try if you’re feeling stressed out.
The software buffers 5 whole songs so you shouldn’t experience any playback issues (we didn’t) unless your net connection is particularly flaky.
According to the developer, all of the audio files played in lowfi are from Lofi Girl’s website, and used under their licensing guidelines.
Here’s a list of the program’s flags.
Website: github.com/talwat/lowfi
Support:
Developer: talwat
License: MIT License
lowfi is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials