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 alsa and it's headers (alsa-lib on Arch, libasound2-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.

AUR

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

yay -S 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.