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.

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

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

I really hate modern music platforms, and I wanted a small, "suckless" app that would just play random lofi without video.

It was also designed to be fairly resilient to inconsistent networks, and as such it buffers 5 whole songs at a time instead of parts of the same song.

See Scraping if you're interested in downloading the tracks. Beware, there's a lot of them.

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.

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.

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

yay -S lowfi

zypper install lowfi

curl -sS https://debian.griffo.io/3B9335DF576D3D58059C6AA50B56A1A69762E9FF.asc | gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/debian.griffo.io.gpg
echo "deb https://debian.griffo.io//apt $(lsb_release -sc 2>/dev/null) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.griffo.io.list
sudo apt install -y lowfi

sudo dnf copr enable furqanhun/lowfi
sudo dnf install lowfi

This is good for debugging, especially in issues.

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

# If you want an actual binary
cargo build --release --all-features
./target/release/lowfi

# If you just want to test
cargo run --all-features

lowfi

Yeah, that's it.

If you have something you'd like to tweak about lowfi, you use additional flags which slightly tweak the UI or behaviour of the menu. The flags can be viewed with lowfi help.

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.

Some nice users, especially danielwerg, have aleady made alternative track lists located in the data directory of this repo. You can use them with lowfi by using the --tracks flag.

Feel free to contribute your own list with a PR.

lowfi also supports custom track lists, although the default one from Lofi Girl 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 ~/Music/minipop.txt it would load from that specified directory.

In lists, the first line should be the base URL, followed by the rest of the tracks. This is also known as the "header", because it comes first.

Each track will be first appended to the base URL, and then the result use to download the track. All tracks must be in the MP3 format, as lowfi doesn't support any others currently.

Additionally, 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/fe85f7a43b689349d9c8f18/2017/11/file_example_MP3_1MG.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/fe85f7a43b689349d9c8f18/2017/11/file_example_MP3_1MG.mp3
• https://lofigirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3

Additionally, you may also specify a custom display name for the track which is indicated by a !. For example, if you had an entry like this:

2023/04/2-In-Front-Of-Me.mp3!custom name

Then lowfi would download from the first section, and display the second as the track name.

You can also prepend file:// to the header track name, which will make lowfi treat it as a local file. This is useful if you want to use a local file as the base URL, such as:

file:///home/user/Music/
file.mp3
file:///home/user/Music/second-file.mp3

Further examples can be found in the data folder.