lowfi

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.

Disclaimer

All of the audio files played in lowfi are from Lofi Girl's website, under their licensing guidelines.

If god forbid you're planning to use this in a commercial setting, please follow their rules.

Why?

I really hate modern music platforms, and I wanted a small, "suckless" app that would literally just play lofi without video so I could use it whenever.

I also wanted it to be fairly resiliant to inconsistent networks, so it buffers 5 whole songs at a time instead of parts of the same song.

Although, lowfi is yet to be properly tested in difficult conditions, so don't rely on it too much until I do that. See Scraping if you're interested in downloading the tracks. Beware, there's a lot of them.

Installing

You'll need Rust 1.74.0+.

If you're on linux, you also need the OpenSSH & Alsa headers. Alsa can be installed with alsa-lib on Arch or libasound2-dev on Ubuntu.

Cargo

The recommended installation method is to use cargo:

cargo install lowfi

and making sure $HOME/.cargo/bin is added to $PATH.

AUR

If you're on Arch, you can also use the AUR:

yay -S lowfi

Usage

lowfi

Yeah, that's it. Controls are documented in the app.

Extra Flags

If you're having issues on Linux with error messages, or you don't want your terminal history to be visible when you run lofi, you can use the --alternate or -a flag to hide your history.

Scraping

lowfi also has a scrape command which is usually not relevant, but if you're trying to download some files from Lofi Girls' website, it can be useful.

An example of scrape is as follows,

lowfi scrape --extension zip --include-full

where more information can be found by running lowfi help scrape.