Chilen
| Languages | Repo | License |
|---|---|---|
| Rust | https://github.com/tpaau/chilen | GPL-3.0 (program), MIT (libraries) |
Fully offline, blazingly fast music player for your library. Built from the ground-up in Rust with native support for Linux, macOS and Windows.
The works on Chilen started around December 2025, mainly because I felt like there isn’t any good software for listening to music locally on Linux. All the players I had tried so far suffered from issues annoying enough to disrupt my listening experience.
I wanted something that would just work, have proper desktop integration, robust features, a beautiful and user-friendly interface, and great performance. Cross-platform support would be a nice addition, too.
Note
By the way, there is an excellent music player for Android that I use daily and take inspiration from while developing Chilen. It's called Auxio, and I strongly suggest you try it out!
Architecture
Chilen is made modular so that its separate components can be reused in other projects. It will still just be a standard desktop app, though. Its fragmentation won’t really affect the end result.
The core part of Chilen is the backend, which
handles playlist management, library indexing, and audio playback. It was previously called
chilen_daemon, but I have since renamed it to chilen_backend and changed it’s purpose. The
daemon had IPC functionality, which required me to maintain a separate API for no apparent gain to
the actual music player app, so I just gave up on it. 1
Another module is iced_m3, a
Material Design 3 widget library for iced. It’s
currently a part of Chilen, but I might release it as a separate project somewhere in the future
(if I feel like it).
Some other projects were specifically created for Chilen but have since branched from the main project:
lrc_rs- Robust crate for working with synced lyrics content in the LRC format with support for the A2 extension (available on crates.io)mru8_rs- Library for working with M3U8 playlist files
Roadmap
This roadmap is subject to change, as my development process is quite chaotic and I’m just one person working on all this. I also don’t specify when I expect the milestones to be reached for the same reason.
| Backend | Implement most of the features currently planned for the backend |
| Graphical interface | Start the works on the graphical interface with iced |
| Initial release | Release the initial version for Linux as a system package and a Flatpak |
| Performance improvements, bug fixes | Drastically improve loading times for large libraries, fix bugs, other improvements |
| Initial cross-platform support | Start working on a Windows and macOS port, add desktop integration for these platforms |
| Improvements | Release the Windows and macOS ports and improve the Linux version |
| More to come! | Robust tag editor, creating custom synced lyrics, other improvements |
Get Involved
I encourage you to try out Chilen yourself - it’s fairly easy to compile, just cargo build. If
you would like to get involved in the development process of Chilen, feel free to
reach out to me!
Also consider starring the repo to let me know that you like the idea!
Note
Chilen has only been tested on Linux so far. It may or may not work properly on other systems. I plan on expanding platform support in the near future, so stay tuned.
-
See my blogpost for details. ↩