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

Note

If you're interested in maintaining a package for lowfi on package managers such as homebrew and the like, open an issue.

Dependencies

You'll need Rust 1.74.0+.

On MacOS & Windows, no extra dependencies are needed.

On Linux, you'll also need openssl & alsa, as well as their headers.

• alsa-lib on Arch, libasound2-dev on Ubuntu.
• openssl on Arch, libssl-dev on Ubuntu.

Make sure to also install pulseaudio-alsa if you're using pulseaudio.

Cargo

The recommended installation method is to use cargo:

cargo install lowfi

# If you want MPRIS support.
cargo install lowfi --features mpris

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

Release Binaries

If you're struggling or unwilling to use cargo, you can just download precompiled binaries from the latest release.

AUR

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

yay -S lowfi

openSUSE

zypper install lowfi

Manual

git clone https://github.com/talwat/lowfi
cd lowfi

cargo build --release
./target/release/lowfi

Usage

lowfi

Yeah, that's it.

Controls

Key	Function
s	Skip song
p	Play/Pause
+/-	Volume Up/Down
q	Quit

Extra Flags

If you have something you'd like to tweak about lowfi, you can run lowfi help to view the available options.

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.

Custom Track Lists

Warning

Custom track lists are going to be pretty particular. This is because I still want to keep lowfi as simple as possible, so custom lists will be very similar to how the built in list functions.

This also means that there will be no added flexibility to these lists, so you'll have to work that out on your own.

lowfi also can support custom track lists, although the default one with Lofi Girl's is embedded into the binary.

To use a custom list, use the --tracks flag. This can either be a path to some file, or it could also be the name of a file (without the .txt extension) in the data directory, so on Linux it's ~/.local/share/lowfi.

For example, lowfi --tracks minipop would load ~/.local/share/lowfi/minipop.txt. Whereas if you did lowfi --tracks /home/user/Music/minipop.txt it would load from that specified directory.

The Format

In List's, the first line should be the base URL, followed by the rest of the tracks.

Each track will be first appended to the base URL, and then the result use to download the track. All tracks should end in .mp3 and as such must be in the MP3 format.

lowfi won't put a / between the base & track for added flexibility, so for most cases you should have a trailing / in your base url. The exception to this is if the track name begins with something like https://, where in that case the base will not be prepended to it.

For example, in this list:

https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/
2023/06/Foudroie-Finding-The-Edge-V2.mp3
2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3
https://file-examples.com/storage/fea570b16e6703ef79e65b4/2017/11/file_example_MP3_5MG.mp3

lowfi would download these three URLs:

• https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Foudroie-Finding-The-Edge-V2.mp3
• https://file-examples.com/storage/fea570b16e6703ef79e65b4/2017/11/file_example_MP3_5MG.mp3
• https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3