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A beautiful music player for your terminal that makes a local library feel alive. Only the good stuff from streaming services, but the music is yours. Organise tracks into buckets you dump into the queue, sculpt the sound with a real 10-band equalizer, drift off in a full-screen zen mode, and let Orbit spin up a radio of similar songs — recommendations from listening to the audio itself, fully offline, no accounts, nothing leaves your machine. Plays MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, M4A/MP4, and AAC.

Built in Rust with ratatui and rodio. Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows, with hardware media-key and system Now Playing integration.

From the repo (any Rust toolchain):

cargo install --git https://github.com/sihooleebd/orbit

Or from a local clone — re-run with --force to update:

cargo install --path . --root ~/.local

Linux also needs ALSA + D-Bus development packages:

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libdbus-1-dev pkg-config        # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel dbus-devel pkgconf-pkg-config   # Fedora

cargo run --release

On first launch Orbit adopts your Music folder if it exists; press A to manage library folders and R to rescan. Config, buckets, and the library cache live under your platform data dir (~/Library/Application Support/orbit on macOS).

The three-pane overview — library, buckets, and the queue:

Zen mode (z) — full-screen player with two visualizers you flip between with v:

The equalizer (e) and the About card (i):

Ten built-in palettes — open Settings (,) → Theme for a live picker:

Synthwave	Nord	Matrix	Solarized	Ember	Dracula	Tokyo Night	Catppuccin	Gruvbox	Rosé Pine

Navigate — Tab panes · ↑↓/j k move · Enter open folder / play · ⌫ up · / search · g/G top/bottom

Playback — Space pause · n/p next/prev · ←→ seek · +/- volume · s shuffle · r repeat

Buckets — b new · S save queue · a add track · o open/edit · m radio (similar) · d dump · x delete/remove · c clear queue

Player & more — A folders · R rescan · D download (yt-dlp) · e EQ · E EQ on/off · z zen · v visualizer · , settings · i about · ? help · q quit

• Buckets — name playlists and d-dump them into the queue. o opens one to play, remove, reorder, or rename tracks; S saves the current queue as a bucket; each gets its own accent colour.

• Smart buckets — auto-filled Recently Added, Most Played, and Recently Played, built from play stats Orbit keeps as you listen.

• Radio / recommendations — Orbit analyses your library in the background (MFCC timbre fingerprints + spectral features) and suggests acoustically similar music — 100% offline, no accounts. A ≈ Radio smart bucket fills itself from what you've been playing, and m starts a radio queue from the selected track. Settings let you scope it to your whole library or just the current folder.

• Folder browsing — the library navigates by folder (Enter / ⌫); / searches everything; A opens a built-in folder picker to add or remove roots.

• Download (D) — paste a URL, pick a download root and folder name, and Orbit fetches the audio as mp3 in the background via yt-dlp (with embedded metadata + cover art), then auto-tracks the folder and rescans. Requires yt-dlp on your PATH; the key is inert without it.

• Equalizer (e) — a real RBJ-biquad 10-band EQ drawn FabFilter-style: a response line over a live spectrum, with five presets and a pre-amp. Turns on the moment you touch it; settings persist.

• Zen mode (z) — full-screen player with synced .lrc lyrics and two visualizers (v): a live audio spectrum or an animated cassette deck.

• Settings (,) — one hub for the equalizer, the theme picker (ten palettes, live preview, saved), the zen visualizer, a sleep timer (15/30/45/60 min or end-of-track, with a fade-out), the radio scope, and a footer-hints toggle.

• OS integration — hardware media keys and the system Now Playing panel (Control Center / MPRIS / SMTC).

• Safe & resilient — confirmation prompts before destructive actions, and event-driven recovery if the audio output device disappears or changes mid-song (cross-platform, with a Linux-specific fallback for silent reroutes).

MIT © 2026 Benjamin Lee