more faster, requires no indexing, organizes the list by files and directories that consume the most space. Why do alternatives exist? To be alternatives.
I've been working on a desktop media player called BlackBird.
The idea started from a simple frustration: modern music/video consumption is almost entirely browser-based or streaming-centric, while local libraries are often poorly supported by modern tools. I wanted something that feels closer to the old Winamp/Foobar era, but built with a modern stack and capable of handling large libraries efficiently.
BlackBird is a desktop media player focused on local media, but with some integrations that bridge offline and online content.
Some features so far:
Library management
Recursive folder import for music and video files
Automatic extraction of ID3 metadata
Album artwork detection and storage
Fast indexing using SQLite
YouTube integration
Add a YouTube link directly to the library
Metadata fetched via oEmbed
Playback through an embedded overlay player
Organization
Views for Songs, Albums, Artists and Videos
Playlist creation with drag & drop
Favorites
Deep search across title, artist, genre and metadata
Editing
Built-in metadata editor
Replace artwork locally
Update tags without leaving the player
Playback
Universal queue mixing local files and YouTube items
Shuffle and repeat modes
Multi-select operations for large libraries
Customization
Theme system based on JSON files
Full export/import of settings, playlists and metadata
From a technical perspective:
Electron for the desktop runtime
Vite for fast builds and development
better-sqlite3 for synchronous, high-performance local database operations
UI built with vanilla TypeScript/JS and CSS to avoid heavy frameworks inside Electron
The goal was to keep the UI responsive even with large libraries, while keeping the architecture relatively simple.
I'm still iterating on it and would love feedback from people who care about desktop apps, media libraries, or Electron performance.
If you're curious, I'm happy to share more details about the architecture, indexing strategy, or performance benchmarks.
This is an early but functional release. Feedback, issues, and contributions are very welcome — especially around performance, UX, and playlist handling.
Right but very few software products can target just that population. It's certainly a great additional language but it can't be primary, methinks. Good stats on the speaker base!
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