kew

kew is a lightweight terminal music player designed for Linux that brings your music library to your fingertips through the command line. Instead of navigating through graphical interfaces, you can search and play music with simple commands like kew cure great to find and play The Cure's greatest hits.

The player excels at library organization and discovery. It automatically creates playlists based on matched songs, albums, or artists, and works best when your music is organized in the standard artist folder → album folder → tracks structure. You can explore your entire library, search for specific tracks, and build custom playlists by adding, removing, and reordering songs.

Key features include:

• Search your music library with partial titles from the command line
• Support for MP3, FLAC, M4A, OPUS, OGG, WebM, WAV, and AIFF formats
• Gapless playback for seamless listening
• Full color album covers in sixel-capable terminals
• Customizable visualizer with various display settings
• Lyrics support through .lrc files, embedded SYLT tags, and Vorbis comments
• Replay gain support for consistent volume levels
• MPRIS desktop integration for system notifications
• Theme customization with colors derived from album covers
• Completely private—no data collection

The interface is distraction-free and puts you in control without algorithmic recommendations. You can customize key bindings, create themes, and configure the player through simple configuration files. Installation is straightforward through most package managers, with additional support for Homebrew on macOS and Nix Flakes for NixOS users.