Fighting the daemon // Chilen devlog 1

If you’ve been following me on my Mastodon, or if you’ve read the projects page on my site, you probably know about Chilen, a music player daemon I’ve been recently working on.

The story behind Chilen is that I got fed up with the state of local music players on Linux and decided to create my own. I started testing Chilen as a server, as it’s simpler to test things from the CLI, and it just kinda stayed that way. My goal shifted from a desktop app to a music player daemon.

I got it to a functional state where it could, well, play music - like you’d expect from a music player - and manage playlists in the music library. There was also the desktop integration with MPRIS and a handful of other nice features like lyrics synchronization.

Here’s a quick demonstration:

But why a daemon? I genuinely don’t know. Maybe I thought it’d be cool or something. It certainly was pretty cool, just not very usable. And the burden of having to maintain a functioning API was getting to me as well. Sadly, I just have a tendency to overcomplicate stuff… I really need to start thinking things over more thoroughly when starting new projects, especially the big ones like Chilen.

So yeah, I feel like I made a mistake by making Chilen a daemon, and I’d rather make it a desktop app from the start if I could turn back time. But I’m not giving up! I already have the backend; I really just need to remove the remains of the daemon code and stitch a GUI to it and I’ll have a working player!

I made it sound a bit more more trivial than it actually is, considering I still have quite a bit of code to refactor and a whole new UI toolkit to learn, but still, I’m moving forward one way or another.

Oh, and here’s a quick look at the prototype UI I made:

Screenshot of the prototype UI containing three columns and an action bar. The action bar contains three buttons on the right labeled as 'minimize', 'maximize' and 'close'. The left section is a playlist view with a pure red background, the center one is just a green background, and the one on the right is blue.

Stunning, isn’t it?

I plan to go with Material Design 3 for the UI in the finished version, currently I’m just testing things out.

If you’re interested in the future development of this incredible project, consider following me on Mastodon or subscribing to my RSS feed.

Have a wonderful day!