Pocket Player

A media player.

Written by Claude Code, Opus 4.8 - low effort. /usage estimates around 330 USD in tokens. (Random evaluation by max effort)

I haven't read most of this, initially an experiment and turned out okay.

Features

• Intentionally Simple
• Local media playback (duh)
  • Multiple media sources
  • Metadata via TagLib, cached to SQLite db
• Local media info via taglib
• Remote media streaming via yt-dlp
  • Treated transparently-ish, indexed into DB with local media
  • Imported via yt-dlp
  • Few specific sites handled: YouTube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, HearThis.at
  • Best-effort for Artist, Album, etc; for everything else yt-dlp supports.
• Mixed playlists with local and remote media, saved as m3u8
• MPRIS on Linux, MediaSession on MacOS
• Self-managed yt-dlp, or checks $PATH

In-Progress (by prio)

• DB invalidation improvements (probably too fragile as-is)
• Checking for new updates via GH latest/releases
• Better custom stylesheet support
• Windows build sigh
• Handful of UI tweaks
  • Spacing of elements
  • Horizontal collapsing is wonky
  • Better matching Qt6 to MacOS
  • Probably tweaks to match Windows sigh
• Building on Woodpecker -> push to GH releases
  • AppImage pipeline scaffolded (.woodpecker.yml); release-publish step still a placeholder
• MacOS's implementation of SMB is garbage and slow
  • #wontfix but I'm mad
• Edge cases for some interaction
• Human Code Review™

Maybe

• webdav? I might be the only one who uses this
• Snazzy audio reactive shader animations, can see this getting out of hand

Images

app

theme example

general settings

library settings

playlist importer

playlist editor

Build

Requires Qt 6 (Core, Gui, Widgets, Multimedia, Sql, Concurrent, Network, SVG, and DBus on Linux), TagLib, FFmpeg (the Qt Multimedia backend), and a C++17 compiler. yt-dlp is an optional runtime dependency for remote streaming.

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake qt6-base qt6-multimedia qt6-svg taglib ffmpeg

Optional: yt-dlp for remote streaming/import; plasma-integration for native KDE theming (Breeze + color scheme).

Compile

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j
./build/mp3player

Build options

Option	Default	Effect
ENABLE_MPRIS	ON (Linux), OFF elsewhere	MPRIS D-Bus media control. Pulls in Qt6::DBus; off = no D-Bus dependency.
ENABLE_DISCORD_RPC	ON	Discord Rich Presence (now-playing status). Cross-platform, no extra dependency (talks Discord's local IPC socket via QLocalSocket).
DISCORD_APP_ID	Pocket Player's app	Discord application/client ID baked into the build. Override to use your own app; can also be overridden at runtime in Settings → Discord.
BUILD_SHADER_DEMO	OFF	Build the standalone QRhiWidget shader/visualizer demo.

e.g. cmake -B build -S . -DENABLE_MPRIS=OFF -DENABLE_DISCORD_RPC=OFF

Packaging (Linux AppImage)

make appimage          # -> Pocket_Player-x86_64.AppImage

Builds against the official Qt (aqtinstall, like the macOS build); install it once:

python3 -m venv ~/.aqt-venv && ~/.aqt-venv/bin/pip install aqtinstall
~/.aqt-venv/bin/aqt install-qt linux desktop 6.11.1 linux_gcc_64 -m qtmultimedia -O ~/Qt

See notes/linux.md for the details (CI, bundling, styling).

Layout

File	Role
src/main.cpp	Entry point
src/MainWindow.*	UI: layout, transport, styling
src/PlayerController.*	Wraps QMediaPlayer/QAudioOutput, playlist navigation
src/PlaylistModel.*	QAbstractListModel of tracks driving the list view
src/MusicLibrary.*	Threaded SQLite tag cache + parallel TagLib scan
src/MprisController.*	MPRIS D-Bus adaptors (optional, ENABLE_MPRIS)

License

Released into the public domain (or under the BSD Zero Clause License) — final license to be decided.

Attribution

Built with:

• Qt 6 — LGPLv3 — https://www.qt.io/
• TagLib — LGPLv2.1 / MPL 1.1 — https://taglib.org/
• FFmpeg — LGPLv2.1+ (Qt Multimedia backend) — https://ffmpeg.org/

Toast sizing approach adapted from qt-toast by Niklas Henning — MIT — https://github.com/niklashenning/qt-toast

album_icon.svg by Pymouss, own work, Public Domain — commons.wikimedia.org