Apache-2.0 — available on crates.io & AUR
audium is a keyboard-driven music player for people who live in the terminal. No Electron. No cloud sync. No background daemons. No FFmpeg. Your files, your library, your rules.
Installation
Cargo (all platforms)
cargo install audium
# requires Rust (edition 2024)
AUR (Arch Linux)
paru -S audium
# or yay, or manually with makepkg
audium targets Linux exclusively and uses ALSA, the standard Linux audio API — its development headers are needed to build, see the README for distro-specific instructions.
Features
Plays MP3, FLAC, OGG, WAV, AAC, M4A, Opus, AIFF and more via Symphonia — no FFmpeg required.
Every action is a single keypress. Tab between panels, j/k to navigate, space to play.
Browse your filesystem and import audio without ever leaving the app.
Artist, album, year and genre are read automatically from your files' tags on import and shown throughout the UI. Edit any field in-app with e, or open the built-in lyrics editor from the same screen.
15 built-in themes — dark, light, nord, gruvbox, catppuccin, rosé pine, dracula, tokyo night, and more. Switch live with instant preview. Transparency support for composited terminals.
Create, rename, and delete playlists. Loop a single track or the whole queue — toggle with l.
Shuffle any playlist into the queue with a single keypress. Keeps your library intact while letting you rediscover it.
Adjust speed from 0.05× to 3× in 0.05× steps with [ and ]. Displayed in the player bar when not at 1×.
Press / to filter by title, artist, album, year or genre in real time. Esc clears. Works across all playlists.
Store plain or LRC synced lyrics per track. Toggle an overlay with y — synced lyrics auto-scroll to the current line; plain lyrics scroll with j/k. Edit directly with the built-in text editor.
Playback runs on a dedicated thread. UI interactions will never stutter your music.
Stored at $XDG_DATA_HOME/audium/library.json — plain JSON, human-readable, editable by hand. audium doesn't rename your files, doesn't embed metadata, and never phones home.
Why audium
Alternatives like termusic ship with heavy dependency trees, FFmpeg requirements, daemon processes, or config formats that take longer to learn than the app itself. audium takes a different approach.
One binary. Zero background processes. Symphonia handles every format natively in-process.
Fewer dependencies means shorter compile times and a ~3 MB release binary with no runtime surprises.
Built on ratatui with a layout designed for daily use — not just feature completeness. Panels, queue, progress bar, volume: everything visible at once.
Written in Rust edition 2024. No unsafe, no global state, no legacy baggage.
Your library is a JSON file you can read, edit, back up, or move between machines freely. audium is a tool, not a platform.
audium plays through your default system output. Switch devices at the OS level and it follows — no in-app device picker that fights your setup.
Keybindings
Playback
| Space | Play / Pause |
| n | Next track |
| N | Previous track |
| ← / → | Seek backward / forward |
| + / = | Volume up |
| - | Volume down |
| l | Cycle loop mode |
| [ / ] | Speed down / up |
Navigation
| Tab | Cycle panel focus |
| j / ↓ | Move down |
| k / ↑ | Move up |
| Enter | Play selected |
| ? | Help overlay |
Library & Queue
| f | Open file picker |
| / | Filter tracklist |
| a | Add to queue |
| p | Add to playlist |
| c | New playlist |
| z | Shuffle playlist into queue |
| d | Remove |
| r | Rename |
| e | Edit track metadata & lyrics |
| y | Toggle lyrics overlay |
| m | Menu |
| q | Quit (confirm) |