Bird Player

A MP3 music player built with egui and Rust, featuring a nostalgic 2000s-inspired interface. Bird Player is originally forked from music-player by notryanb and try to make it a serious daily-used music player. If you miss the golden era of desktop music players, this might be for you!

Note

Development builds use an isolated bird-player-dev data directory. Production packages must enable the production-data feature explicitly.

Features

• 🎨 Retro-inspired UI built with egui, reminiscent of classic 2000s music players
• 📁 Local music library and playlist management with familiar browsing experience
• 🏷️ ID3 tag management and editing support for music metadata
• 📱 Cross-platform support

TODO

• Improve the resource usage and make it small and fast
• Add support for more audio formats and use https://docs.rs/lofty/latest/lofty/ to manage metadata
• Add support for batch tag editing
• Add support for lyrics searching and displaying
• Add support for speed control
• Implement a skin system

Installation

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.85 or higher
• Cargo package manager
• Audio system libraries (see Audio Backends below)

Building from Source

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/bird-player.git
cd bird-player

2. Build the project:

# With PulseAudio support (recommended for Linux)
cargo build --release --features pulseaudio

# Without PulseAudio (using CPAL directly)
cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be available in target/release/bird-player.

macOS App Bundle

Build a macOS .app bundle with:

cargo bundle --release --features production-data

The bundle is written to target/release/bundle/osx/Bird Player.app. To install it locally, copy it to /Applications.

When the app is launched from Finder, Dock, or LaunchServices, it does not inherit the interactive shell PATH. Any bundled build that calls user-installed command line tools must set a runtime PATH explicitly. Bird Player currently does this for yt-dlp by adding common user binary directories such as ~/.local/bin, ~/bin, /opt/homebrew/bin, and /usr/local/bin before spawning the command. Keep this in mind when adding future external tools, otherwise a tool that works in Terminal may fail inside the packaged app with "not found".

For a local upgrade, use the safe installer:

./install_mac_app.sh

It builds with production data enabled, closes the running app, verifies and backs up the SQLite database, preserves the old app bundle, installs the new bundle, and verifies the database again after launch. Old app bundles use the non-launchable .app.backup suffix so they cannot accidentally open the production database.

Plain cargo run and cargo run --release intentionally use the isolated development database. This prevents local UI testing from modifying the installed app's music library and playlists.

At startup, Bird Player creates and integrity-checks a SQLite snapshot in the profile's backups directory, retaining the 10 newest snapshots. A build that encounters an unknown or newer database schema stops with a visible warning; it never drops or rebuilds existing user tables.

Usage

1. Launch Bird Player:

cargo run --release

2. Use the file dialog to add your music directory
3. Browse and play your music collection
4. Enjoy your music with high-quality audio playback

License

MIT

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

Acknowledgments

The project is originally forked from music-player by notryanb. Thanks to all the Rust crate authors whose work made this project possible.