Why I Started Building My Own Windows Music Player - Auricle

Auricle is a Windows music player developed by the journalist, aiming to be lightweight and efficient. The creator was not looking for a new project, but wanted a music player that could run smoothly while gaming or streaming without consuming too much memory and CPU. They had tried Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, but found their resource usage to be bothersome. The journalist also explored open-source alternatives, but none of them provided the focused desktop application experience they were seeking.

Initially, the journalist started with a small wish list to create Auricle, which is built using Rust and Slint. Their goals were clear: to have a low resource usage, a good user interface, solid autoplay, and enough practical features to use regularly. The journalist chose a native UI rather than an Electron or embedded-webview approach, despite understanding that this choice does not automatically guarantee performance.

Building a music player involves more than just the interface. The journalist had to consider the whole experience, including search results, queue behavior, playback controls, local library, and stream extraction. They also had to deal with optional add-ons, upstream service changes, packaging and updates. Even distributing an early build posed another challenge, as the unsigned installer faced antivirus detections, while separate scans of the installed and portable application executables reported no issues.

Auricle is currently Windows-only and the journalist plans to explore Linux support in the future. For now, it remains an early project, and the journalist acknowledges that there is still much work to be done in making desktop music players as seamless as the journalist desires. The journalist invites users to check out Auricle on its GitHub page.