A remote music player with MPRIS support. Perfect for those who enjoy owning their music.

Install from cargo with cargo install foksal-{TYPE} (where TYPE is one of local, remote or proxy, see below) or download the source code and build foksal locally. Minimum supported Rust version (MSRV): 1.90.

In the descriptions below, music_root denotes the path (relative or absolute) to the root directory of your music collection.

If your music collection is stored locally, run foksal-local -m=<music_root>.

Set up a remote foksal instance by running foksal-remote -m=<music_root> on the server where your music is stored. Then, on your local machine connect to the remote instance with foksal-proxy --remote-addr=<ip_address>.

To see all available options for a given binary, run it with the --help flag.

You will most likely want foksal to start at boot and run as a background process (as a systemd unit, for example).

Foksal reads its configuration from a TOML config file, by default ~/.config/foksal/foksal.toml (change the path with the -c flag if needed). If the config file isn't there, it will be generated based on the default config and passed CLI arguments. All available options are listed below:

• port - The port for clients to connect to (default: 2137).
• music_root - The root directory of your music collection (default: foksal's working dir).
• audio_backend - The audio backend (alsa, pulse, pipewire, etc.) (default: well, 1default` - it should work just fine).
• allowed_exts - A list of extensions that foksal will treat as music files (default: mp3, m4a and flac).
• n_jobs - How many songs can be decoded in parallel (default: the number of available CPU cores). Careful: each decoded song requires a chunk of RAM.
• ignore_globset - A list of Unix glob patterns that foksal will ignore when searching for music (default: empty).

• interface - The interface the remote instance will listen on (default: 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces)).
• port, music_root, allowed_exts, n_jobs and ignore_globset - Same meaning as in local config (port is the port that proxy instances should connect to, make sure it's accessible).

• remote_addr - The IP address of the remote foksal instance.
• remote_port - The port the remote instance is listening on.
• local_port - The port for clients to connect to.
• audio_backend - Same meaning as in local config.

Keep in mind that all foksal binaries read the same config file by default (meaning that, as an example, you don't need two almost-duplicated config file for local and proxy - if proxy reads a config key it doesn't need, it will just silently ignore it).

Foksal isn't very useful all by itself, you will need an external client to control it.

For now, only a basic CLI-based client is available, install it with cargo install foksal-ctl. It's not very human-friendly, but can work well as part of a scripting pipeline (for instance, to display the current song on your statusbar).

Another option is to control foksal with playerctl, just like any other MPRIS-compatible player.

A GUI client will be released soon.

Currently planned features:

• Data persistence between restarts.
• Support for user-specific data (ratings, comments, ...).
• Support for song lyrics.
• Support for frequency spectrum visualization.

Want to contribute? Create an issue on Codeberg (that's where foksal's development happens, the parallel GitHub repo is just a mirror).

Foksal (/ˈfɔk.sal/) is a street in my hometown. Also, it's no secret that software with foxes is the best.