README

inLimbo

Documentation · Features · Looks . Get Started · Report a bug

Warning

inLimbo is a WIP

Most aspects of the project are under heavy development and no stable release is present as of yet.

The inLimbo project aims to be a new upcoming TUI music player for UNIX based systems that gives music lovers a clean and efficient environment to browse, play and interact with your favourite offline music.

Why

There are a dozen of great music players out there that do a really good job of making my music experience top notch, but nothing was ever perfect. So I tried making something that in my opinion comes closest to my ideal TUI music player.

Why would you want to stay in Limbo?

Sometimes it feels good to be stuck in a weird place in your life, and it feels even better to be stuck in Limbo with music :)

Features

• Fully configurable: Keybinds, library, FTP credentials, and more, all in one config.toml file located in $HOME/.config/inLimbo/config.toml
• Very fast and easy to use: Optimized for speed and usability.
• Very few external dependencies: Minimal setup required to get started.
• Clean and nice TUI experience: Interact with your music library seamlessly in a terminal interface.
• Showcases all the metadata: Displays song metadata, including lyrics, genre, and more, for every file in your library.
• Plays and caters to many audio file formats: Compatible with a variety of audio formats, depending on the capabilities of miniaudio.
• Customizable: Heavily customizable TUI with custom keybinds, colors, UI designs and much more to come...
• Privacy: No data is collected by inLimbo other than a backtrace of when the application catches a critical signal like SIGSEGV, SIGABRT

LOOKS

DEPENDENCIES

Important

It is HIGHLY recommended to have FFmpeg installed in your system

This is required for testing purposes (./tests/), and in the future, inLimbo may have features to embed your desired metadata to an audio file.

Dependency	Ubuntu	Fedora	Arch Linux
TagLib	libtag1-dev	taglib-devel	taglib
Gio	libgio-2.0-dev	glib2-devel	glib2
GLib	libglib-2.0-dev	glib2-devel	glib2
pkg-config	pkg-config	pkgconf	pkgconf
ImageMagick	imagemagick	ImageMagick	imagemagick
X11	libx11-dev	libX11-devel	libx11
PNG	libpng-dev	libpng-devel	libpng
cereal	libcereal-dev	libcereal-devel	cereal

Note

If cereal is NOT available in your linux distribution,

git clone https://github.com/USCiLab/cereal.git # download cereal 
mv cereal/include/* /usr/include/ # moves include/cereal headers to your include directory 
# If you find that risky, just modify CMakeLists.txt to include cereal's directory for building

FTXUI is fetched from GitHub here itself during building so NO need to install it separately.

GOAL

The goal of this project is just to find peace and solitude for me as I try to create something I wanted for a long time

Here are a few novelties that may or may not have been added yet:

1. Cool and amazing TUI experience thanks to FTXUI
2. Full use of metadata (lyrics, genre, thumbnail, etc..) and available for display
3. Simple and easy network transfer of your favourite songs over to another device
4. Fast and efficient loading of your song directory with everything you need :)
5. TUI over the web?? (Why would you want this)
6. Active testing of the codebase using GTest Suite
7. Security ensured using CodeQL workflow

BUILDING

Important

inLimbo has been TRIED AND TESTED in the following GNU/Linux distros:

1. Arch Linux (x86-64 arch)
2. Ubuntu (x86-64 arch)
3. Fedora/Nobara Linux (x86-64 arch)
   
   As long as your distribution can install & build the requirements, there should NOT be any issue
   
   

You will need CMake and Make (GNU Make for BSD) for this (and git obvi)

A simple command using makefile should build everything you want:

make build-all

For a GLOBAL BUILD:

make build-global

Check out BUILD.md for more options to build targets

Note

To try debug build check out DEBUGGING

Getting Started with inLimbo

Running inLimbo

To get started with inLimbo, run the following command:

inLimbo # or wherever you have built the binary

To get help regarding the command-line arguments available with inLimbo, you can use the --help option:

inLimbo --help

Cache and Directory Management

If you update the song directory in config.toml, inLimbo does not automatically remove the static serialized lib.bin file, which is used to load the song map.

To ensure that inLimbo loads the directory dynamically, use the following command:

inLimbo --update-cache-run

You can also merge the dynamic load with other arguments like so:

inLimbo --update-cache-run --print-song-tree # will create a new song map and print it regardless of lib.bin data

Note that this will result in slower song map times as the song map is generated dynamically on each run.

Command-Line Arguments

• --help Description: Display help information about available arguments for inLimbo.
• --version Description: Display the version number of inLimbo.
• --clear-cache Description: Clear cached data, which includes the song map and other temporary data stored by the application.
• --show-config-file Description: Display the path to the configuration file used by inLimbo.
• --show-log-dir Description: Show the directory path where logs are stored for inLimbo.
• --show-dbus-name Description: Show the DBus service name used by inLimbo.
• --update-cache-run Description: Update the cache file and run the application. This will make inLimbo load the directory dynamically every time (note that this will result in slower song map times).
• --print-song-tree Description: Print the song map parsed from the directory. This shows the structure of the song tree and how songs are organized.
• --print-artists-all Description: Print all parsed artists from the song map. This will list all artists found in the directory and their corresponding songs.
• --print-songs-by-artist Description: Print all the songs of a given artist. This argument requires you to specify the artist’s name, and it will list all songs by that artist.
• --print-songs-by-genre-all Description: Print all parsed genres and their song mappings. This will show all the genres available in the song map and list songs under each genre.
• --print-song-info Description: Print every parsed information (even default info) regarding a song (Arguments: Can take SONG NAME or FILE PATH)

Note

To utilize these arguments to the fullest, it is HIGHLY recommended to use something like less/bat that allows for neat terminal output traversal (will allow for you to view the entire song tree parsing)

inLimbo --print-song-tree | bat # an example of using bat to view the song tree (can traverse the output easily)

This ensures that you do not have any struggle with viewing the entire console output.

There will be more command-line arguments in the future...

CONFIGURATION

There is quite a lot to configure in the inLimbo project. A basic config file will be setup in your $HOME/.config/inLimbo/ directory while using CMake to build

Important

Check out config.toml to see all the possible fields for configuration

IT IS UNDER HEAVY DEVELOPMENT SO EXPECT BREAKING CHANGES WITH EACH COMMIT

COLORS FORMAT

-> Hexadecimal #RRGGBB format

-> TrueColors (Solid predefined colors):

Note

For TrueColors, check out COLORS for more information on how to set up colors in inLimbo

DEFAULT KEYBINDS

General Navigation

Keybind	Action
q	Quit the application
Tab	Toggle focus between the "Artists" and "Songs" panes
?	Show or hide the help menu
/	Open the search menu

Scrolling and Selection

Keybind	Action
j	Scroll down (move selection down in the list)
k	Scroll up (move selection up in the list)
0	Move to the next search result (if search is active)
9	Move to the previous search result (if search is active)

Playback Controls

Keybind	Action
Space	Toggle play/pause for the currently playing song
Enter	Play the currently selected song
n	Play the next song in the queue
p	Play the previous song in the queue
r	Replay the current song
m	Toggle mute on/off

Seeking and Volume Control

Keybind	Action
h	Seek backward by 5 seconds
l	Seek forward by 5 seconds
=	Increase volume
-	Decrease volume
w	Toggle between available audio devices

Song and Queue Management

Keybind	Action
a	Add the currently selected song to the queue
e	Add all songs of the selected artist to the queue
b	Play this song next (insert it into the queue immediately after the current song)
d	Remove the currently selected song from the queue
3	View the current song queue

Song Information and UI Navigation

Keybind	Action
1	Go to the main UI screen
2 or L	View lyrics of the currently playing song
i	View detailed information about the current song

Status Bar & UI Settings

Keybind	Action
true/false (UI setting)	Show or hide bitrate information in the status bar

DEBUGGING

inLimbo is in active development and is prone to having A LOT of issues

-> Makefile also allows for building and running of a debug build.

To try out DEBUG BUILD to find bugs/issues:

1. Debug build with AddressSanitizer (ASan):

mkdir build-dbg/
cd build-dbg/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug-ASan ..
make
./inLimbo-DBG-Asan

1. Debug build with Thread Sanitizer (TSan):

mkdir build-dbg/
cd build-dbg/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug-TSan ..
make
./inLimbo-Debug-Tsan

The DEBUG BUILD will account for the following issues:

-> Threads

-> Address Sanitation (ASan)

-> Undefined Behaviour Sanitation (UBSan)

DIRECTORY SORTING

inLimbo reads a directory and attempts to parse each inode for its metadata using TagLib, and accordingly creates a song map datastructure that is utilized to efficiently traverse the required artist, album, song etc.

To know more about inLimbo Project's logical flow on creating a song map, visit SONGMAP

TESTING

The inLimbo project is aiming to be more aware of how bad its codebase is, hence I am setting up unit tests for most if not all functions/classes that should:

1. Give more clarity on how the logical flow of the function/class works in a test suite
2. Logical flaws and boundary conditions going unchecked can be understood better
3. Should give more confidence in the code structure if such tests pass

The testing is done using GTest, read TESTS.md to understand more on how tests are configured and built

DOCUMENTATION

There is a primitive Doxygen documention set up for the inLimbo project, that should explain a lot more about the thought process and idea behind every aspect of the codebase.

Man page is also under progress

To generate and view doxygen documentation locally:

doxygen .Doxyfile # ensure that you have doxygen installed first 
cp -r assets/gifs/ docs/
cp index.html docs/
firefox docs/html/index.html # or any web browser (xdg-open also works)

It is much easier to use the script make_docs.sh

./make_docs.sh

Or you could just visit inLimbo Website

CREDITS

LOGO:

DISCLAIMER: This is not an original logo nor was it commisioned by me

It is a basic stock image found online. I got it from here

TOML PARSER:

To parse the config.toml is thanks to TOML++

AUDIO PLAYBACK & API:

Audio playback and capture is thanks to miniaudio

INSPIRATIONS:

This music player's UI flow is heavily inspired by CMUS, it seemed (to me atleast) the fastest and most responsive and logical UI/UX design of a TUI that has a great balance between looking good and feeling smooth

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inLimbo is Free and Open Source Software Licensed under GNU GPL v3