A Terminal Music Player Based on afplay Written in Haskell

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague shared the latest Radiohead album with me.

I could have simply double-clicked on a song to start iTunes, but that seemed too easy and iTunes was just too bloated. What I needed was a minimal audio player, even better: a terminal audio player.

With a quick search, I discovered afplay, a Darwin command-line utility to play audio files. afplay worked fine, but I also wanted to pause/resume, skip songs, and continue listening to songs sequentially without having to start a new command each time.

It was the perfect excuse to write some Haskell.

I began developing a terminal interface on top of afplay. After less than a week of late-night hacking, and thanks to brick, a library to write terminal applications, the first version of haskell-player was ready.

The current set of features is minimal, and the app only works on OS X because it requires afplay and afinfo. Nevertheless, I’m quite happy with the result.

Fork it at github.com/potomak/haskell-player.