ommp — a terminal music player

Seven ways into the same library

The tab strip across the top is the whole navigation model. Each one is a different question about the same files.

Queue
Everything queues by default. Add an album without losing what is playing, drop a track with d, clear it with c.
Directories
Browse the folders you actually organised, not a database's idea of them.
Artists
Grouped by the track artist, exactly as the file is tagged. Untagged files land under one heading instead of vanishing.
Albums
Paired with the album artist where it is tagged, the track artist where it is not — so two records called Greatest Hits stay two records.
Genre
Whatever your tags say. ommp reads them, it does not invent them.
Format
FLAC, MP3, M4A, OGG, WAV, Opus, AAC, WMA — with a count beside each.
Playlists
Create, rename, star a track with b. Saved between sessions, and entries survive a drive that was not mounted.

Fast enough to forget about

Measured on this machine, not estimated. A library that takes a moment to open is a library you stop opening.

18 ms: to open a 5,000-track library; Tags are cached and re-read only when a file's timestamp or size changes. The first scan runs across every core.
0.3 ms: per frame at 50,000 tracks; Flat, not linear — the browse views are built once when the library loads, not on every redraw.
7 MB: one binary, three libraries; Links against alsa-lib, glibc and gcc-libs. Nothing to configure, nothing running in the background.

Find it while you type

Results narrow on every keystroke. Narrow further with a field, or by format.

artist:yorushika
album:elma
genre:rock
*.flac

The search overlay filtering a library down to fifty of fifty-two tracks

Keys where you expect them

Vim motions for the lists, media keys for the music. The mouse works too — click a tab, double-click a track, Ctrl-drag a border to resize.

SpacePlay / pause
n / NNext / previous
+ / -Volume
s / rShuffle / repeat
1–7Switch tab
TabCycle pane focus
Ctrl+SSearch
Ctrl+HEvery other key

The keybinding overlay, two columns covering playback and navigation

Two things to check first

A Nerd Font

The interface is built from Nerd Font icons. Without one they render as empty boxes. Install JetBrainsMono Nerd Font or similar and set it as your terminal font.

A graphics protocol, for album art

Cover art is read out of the audio file itself and drawn as a real image where the terminal supports it. ommp detects which protocol is available at startup — there is nothing to configure.

Kitty graphics	Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, Konsole
Sixel	foot, WezTerm, xterm, Contour
iTerm2	WezTerm, Konsole

Anything else falls back to block characters, which still shows the artwork — just coarser. GPU acceleration is unrelated: Alacritty is accelerated and supports none of these; xterm is not and supports Sixel.

Install

Arch Linux yay -S ommp

With Rust installed cargo install ommp

From source git clone https://github.com/sqzer-x/ommp

Then put some music in ~/Music and run ommp.