alt.hn

3/23/2026 at 8:42:22 PM

A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp

 https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp

by mkagenius

3/24/2026 at 1:14:18 AM

I remember with nostalgia the mp3blaster. I spent years listening to it in my terminal. At one point I used only cli without graphical desktop on slackware and one of my TTYs was dedicated to it.

Turns out these times are forever gone - never to come back. The huge disappointment when I tried this on the first run to play a mp3 file from my local disk and it initiated outbound connection. Why a local CLI player needs outbound TCP connection to play a local file from my local disk?!?! The answer was in the source. It is called telemetry. Back then when I used mp3blaster we used to call this spyware, but the times had changed since then.

by Habgdnv

3/24/2026 at 8:13:47 AM

Back in the day I used to use mpg123. It's still available, but most of the time today I use mpv (successor to "mplayer", handles video too, opens a separate window, zero chrome) or ffplay, since they have wider format support.

No playlist or even file management - they do show id3tags, that's about it. No telemetry, SaaS chicanery or "improvement" upgrades every few days, either.

by senko

3/24/2026 at 1:36:18 AM

The times haven't changed. It's still spyware, it's just been normalised.

by samplatt

3/24/2026 at 1:28:36 AM

OIC: https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp/blob/main/telemetry/teleme...

Should be easy to nerf, but the build instructions are kinda vague. Clone, and then what? Something like "go build" or something I guess.

Looks cool though

by tosti

3/24/2026 at 5:19:44 AM

No personal data is collected

IP address (which can be geolocated) along with a unique identifier is not considered "personal data"? This is basically a tracking cookie. It also seems to use HTTP, which is itself widely fingerprintable based on what request headers it sends.

by userbinator

3/24/2026 at 7:30:46 AM

It's gone: https://github.com/bjarneo/cliamp/commit/085734a86343a80176d...

by GrayShade

3/24/2026 at 8:33:47 AM

Thanks for pointing this out, to me it seems quite a good response.

I wouldn't mind opt-in telemetry, but possibly the participation rate would be too low to make use of it.

by taneliv

3/24/2026 at 9:52:17 AM

My issue with telemetry is that 99% of software ends up not using it. Why have it? And definitely don't have it by default. Your users will come tell you what they want, making telemetry useless, especially when it's an OSS project you're mostly building for yourself.

by stavros

3/24/2026 at 10:43:17 AM

Opt-in via extension, fine. Opt-in via flag, unreliable. The spyware code should never be anywhere near the main codebase.

by kgwxd

3/24/2026 at 8:40:26 AM

Yay! Also, I hadn't noticed an entire section about building from source. Sorry about that. Good work!

by tosti

3/24/2026 at 9:15:45 AM

Woo, good on them

by blamesoft

3/24/2026 at 1:34:41 AM

There's a config variable and a cli flag to disable.

That seems reasonable to me.

by gesis

3/24/2026 at 5:20:26 AM

to disable

All such surveillance behaviour should strictly be OPT IN.

by userbinator

3/24/2026 at 1:33:53 AM

I saw it, it is NOT spyware. It just sends a random UUID. It is just a personal disappointment for the fact that it is something so simple as a console player and yet connects somewhere. But that's just me. I grew up in other times.

Also I just compiled mp3blaster and I am listening to it again. So cool!

by Habgdnv

3/24/2026 at 5:23:40 AM

You can still set up an mpd server: https://www.musicpd.org/ that runs on your local files.

by liendolucas

3/24/2026 at 11:03:55 AM

I used to use mocp under Unix but nowadays it's just audio/zuke in 9front with plumber settings for playlists.

by anthk

3/24/2026 at 6:55:11 AM

Telemetry on by default in a CLI app seems very weird

by blamesoft

3/24/2026 at 3:09:44 AM

Like others the telemetry is hugely undesirable nor necessary. Likewise if they truly don't collect your IP as they claim it's just ripe for endless abuse.

by jjshoe

3/24/2026 at 1:33:08 AM

Just installed this, loving it so far! Thank you!

by daytonix

3/24/2026 at 6:03:01 AM

Imagine telling your AI to include unsecured telemetry… all im the namesake of mother Russia and father China. Wait no, that’s the wrong message.

by sn0n

3/24/2026 at 2:40:11 AM

As someone who is fond of Windows music players and futuristically designed DIN stereos of the early-to-mid 2000s, the variety of console visualizations is wicked cool and very much welcome! This is easily the best feature of cliamp. I'd love the collection of visualizations as a separate program, akin to cava[1], that listens and responds to your default audio sink. I already use a Raspberry Pi for music while driving, so I'm already thinking about displaying these visualizations on my car's infotainment screen somehow.

As a friendly request, I'd love to be able to use up and down keys to seek one minute forward or backward during playback, like with mpv. I play a lot of mixes that are an hour or longer in length, so this functionality would be a nice-to-have. I'll likely submit this idea to GitHub, anyhow.

To share some honest criticism, I was disappointed to discover built-in telemetry. Although it can be disabled with a flag, I dislike how it's enabled by default and unknown to the user unless one specifies the -h flag. I don't understand why user diagnostics data is needed from a console music player. Make this anti-feature opt-in and instead rely primarily on bug reports, or make the user aware of this telemetry upon initial invocation and provide instructions on how to disable it. Constructively, know your audience.

But overall, thank you to all the maintainers for this cool software!

[1]: https://github.com/karlstav/cava

by stutstev

3/24/2026 at 7:42:41 AM

Winamp was pretty cool. When I switched to Linux, many years ago, I wanted to have winamp too. I think I used bmp for a while until it died; before that xmms but that one also sort of died.

Meanwhile some other GUI showed up, I forgot the name. I kind of gave up on winamp, mostly because my use cases shifted. I went to mplayer, then mpv, and now I am too used to using mpv for literally anything related to audio and video (which in turn uses ffmpeg of course). I kind of built a commandline helper variant that just plays anything I have local - audio, video. I could probably go and find a nice UI again, and that may have advantages such as simply scrolling through the list or setting ad-hoc favourites, but I don't quite need it anymore; I am faster with the keyboard too, so my use cases changed. To play all audio from Hans Zimmer, for instance, I may type "rsong Zimm" or something like that. (I also alias a lot so I may just type "zimmer" instead, but most of the time if I use it I just have it default to random selection as I don't care what is played normally.)

by shevy-java

3/24/2026 at 7:38:58 AM

Should have called it clamp

by poolnoodle

3/24/2026 at 1:10:16 AM

The project is cool, the demo song is iconically AI not great, sorry.

by samschooler

3/24/2026 at 9:27:24 AM

The project is not promoting it's music taste and ability..

by bilekas

3/24/2026 at 7:44:31 AM

I've checked out the three radio stations, they are lame, too. Not sure if AI or otherwise low effort, but not good in any case.

by ahartmetz

3/24/2026 at 1:24:38 AM

I’ve been using this in Omarchy, it’s really great - easy to use and can do any songs or playlist on YouTube, so I’ll pipe through those programming concentration playlists without visiting YouTube.

by Vaslo