FerrumPlay is a music player for the Linux desktop. Dark, tidy and without detours: the cover art and the details of the current track on the left, the playlist grouped by album on the right, the transport controls at the bottom. You point it at your music folders, and it plays.
It is built with Avalonia UI and .NET 10, in VB.NET, and plays through libmpv. Like its sibling FerrumPix, it started as a private project - an application built exactly the way I wanted one to look and work - and it is free and open source for anyone who finds it useful.
To be transparent: yes, I use AI to support my development workflow. It still takes a lot of manual work, planning and debugging, and a lot of care went into the details.
I wanted a player in the spirit of the classic desktop players: one window, a real playlist, the album in front of you - no streaming service, no library database to maintain, no account. Files and folders go in, music comes out, and everything stays on your own machine.
FerrumPlay does not import or rearrange your collection. It reads what is in the files, groups the playlist by the folders your albums already live in, and remembers where you left off.
- Plays what you have. MP3, FLAC, OGG, Opus, M4A, AAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, WavPack, APE, WMA, Musepack, DSF and MP2.
- Knows your tracks. Artist, album, year, duration, sample rate and bitrate are read from the file's tags. The cover comes from the track itself or from an image in its folder.
- Groups by album. Every folder becomes a group with a header, track count and total running time. Groups can be collapsed.
- Finds quickly. The quick search filters by title, artist, album and file name.
- Takes what you give it. Drag files and whole folders into the window, add them with the buttons below the list, or pass them on the command line. M3U/M3U8 playlists can be saved, loaded, and opened the same way.
- Shuffle and repeat. Whole list or a single track. Don't want to hear a track right now? Untick it instead of removing it.
- Gapless. A continuously mixed album plays from track to track without a break.
- Plays and identifies Audio CDs. On Linux, an inserted Audio CD is detected automatically and appears as a separate temporary playlist. Its tracks can be selected, searched and played just like files; ejecting the disc removes the playlist again. The disc is looked up at MusicBrainz from its track lengths alone, so titles, artist, album and year are filled in instead of "Track 01" — and they go into the tags, along with the cover art, when the CD is converted. A configurable placeholder pattern can place each rip in its own album subfolder.
- Browses Lyrion. Connect up to three Lyrion Media Servers, each in its own named tab, to search its albums as you type, view server artwork, and play an album locally through FerrumPlay. The album becomes a temporary playlist, including next/previous, shuffle, repeat, and jump-to-current-track. Unchecking a track leaves it out of that playback, the same way it works in the playlist. Sort the overview by recently added, artist/year, album or year/album, in either direction, and filter it down to your favorites. The favorites filter also reports the space needed for syncing. "Refresh library" asks the server to look for new and changed music first, rather than showing the same state again.
- Works as a remote control. A picker chooses where playback runs: locally, or on any player registered with the Lyrion server. With a device chosen, the whole transport bar controls it — play, pause, next, previous, seek, volume, mute, shuffle and repeat — and the desktop's media keys and status display follow it too.
- Keeps your favorites. A star on every album tile marks it as a favorite on the server, where every other Lyrion client sees it too. One button then mirrors those albums into a folder of your choosing: only what is missing or has changed is transferred, and anything in the folder that is no longer a favorite is removed. The files come from the server, so your library stays untouched and no network mount is needed.
- Edits MP3 albums. Update shared album metadata and per-track titles or numbers, replace the embedded cover, clean up tags, and keep useful defaults for recurring album work.
- Converts without another app. Convert a title or album to MP3 (CBR or VBR), FLAC or Ogg Vorbis. Whole selections or individual source folders can become one ordered file, with a live queue that follows the title currently being converted.
- Evens out loudness. ReplayGain by track, by album, or automatically: by album while an album plays through, by track when shuffling.
- Notices missing files. Tracks whose file is gone are greyed out and skipped instead of stopping playback. Plug the drive back in and they return; one click removes them all.
- Fits into the desktop. FerrumPlay speaks MPRIS, so Waybar, playerctl, notifications and the media keys reach it even while its window is in the background - with title, artist, album and cover.
- Runs once. Open a file or folder from the file manager while FerrumPlay is running, and the running window takes it over, plays it, expands its album group and scrolls directly to the requested track.
- Remembers everything. Playlist, volume, window position and the last track are back at the next start - and if you like, playback resumes right where it stopped.
- Speaks your language. Twenty-one languages, following your system by default.
The window is split into three areas. The cover column on the left shows the artwork, title, artist, album and the technical details of the track; its width can be dragged. The playlist on the right lists your albums with their tracks, while an inserted Audio CD has its own tab. The track that is playing stays highlighted even when the selection is somewhere else. Behind both, the cover of the current track fills the window, softly blurred.
The transport sits on a dark deck at the bottom: the progress bar across the full width, shuffle and repeat on the left, previous, stop, play and next in the middle, and the volume on the right. The volume is a rotary knob, taken from the FerrumPlay logo - drag it up or to the right to turn it up, or use the mouse wheel or the arrow keys.
Accent colour, font size, language, the blurred cover background, the width of the cover column, gapless playback, volume leveling (ReplayGain) with a preamp, and resuming on start are all configurable. The MP3 editor and Lyrion browser also keep their own defaults; entering a Lyrion server profile makes its own player tab available, and a separate target folder per server enables the favorites sync. The MP3 section also sets the edge length cover art is brought to, which governs the image fetched for an identified CD as well, and the audio converter section holds the target folder for ripping audio CDs, which defaults to your music folder. The version is shown there too, with a link to the release page whenever a newer one is published. On Linux, the whole interface can also be scaled per screen, for displays where it would otherwise come out too small.
| Package | For | Get it |
|---|---|---|
| AUR | Arch, CachyOS, Manjaro, EndeavourOS | paru -S ferrumplay-bin (or yay -S ferrumplay-bin) |
| AppImage | Any distribution, runs without installing | FerrumPlay-x86_64.AppImage |
| DEB | Debian, Ubuntu, Mint | FerrumPlay-amd64.deb |
| RPM | Fedora, openSUSE | FerrumPlay-x86_64.rpm |
| ZIP | Portable, unpack and run (x64) | FerrumPlay-linux-x64.zip |
ferrumplay-bin tracks each release and pulls
in the dependencies below on its own. The download addresses above stay the same from version to
version, so a bookmark or an update script keeps working; the AppImage also carries update
information, so tools that manage AppImages find new versions by themselves.
The packages are self-contained and bring the .NET runtime with them. libmpv is needed and comes from your distribution:
| Distribution | Package |
|---|---|
| Arch, CachyOS, Manjaro | mpv |
| Debian, Ubuntu, Mint | libmpv2 |
| Fedora | mpv-libs |
Without it FerrumPlay starts, but tells you it cannot play anything. The converter additionally
uses FFmpeg (ffmpeg on Arch, Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora); Audio-CD ripping uses
cdparanoia. The DEB, RPM and AUR packages declare both as dependencies.
Audio CD playback uses the optical drive directly. On Linux, your account needs read access to the drive (typically through the distribution's optical-drive permission group).
The code is prepared for both, but there are no packages yet and they are untested. MPRIS and the single running instance need the D-Bus session bus and are Linux only. If you build it there and try it, please let me know how it goes.
FerrumPlay [--debug] [file or folder ...]
Files, folders, and M3U/M3U8 playlists passed on the command line are opened directly. Folders are included with their subfolders, and the first supplied audio track starts playing:
FerrumPlay ~/Music/Album
FerrumPlay track.flac another.mp3
FerrumPlay ~/Playlists/favorites.m3uIf FerrumPlay is already running, the running instance takes the files and folders over, plays the first track, and scrolls the playlist to it; the new call exits right away without opening a second window. Called without paths, it brings the running window to the front.
--debug writes a log for this run.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| SPACE | Play and pause |
| ESC | Back from the settings |
| Media keys | Play, pause, next, previous, stop - system-wide through MPRIS |
Double-click a track to play it, double-click an album header to collapse or expand the group.
Settings and the playlist are stored in ~/.config/FerrumPlay/.
Requires the .NET SDK 10 or newer, and libmpv to actually hear something.
dotnet build FerrumPlay.sln
dotnet run --project FerrumPlay.vbprojpackaging/package.sh builds the AppImage and the portable ZIP.
FerrumPlay is GPL-3.0-only. Every package carries that licence text and a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt naming each component and the licence it is used under: .NET, Avalonia UI and SkiaSharp (MIT), Skia (BSD-3-Clause), HarfBuzz (Old MIT), TagLib# (LGPL-2.1) and Tabler Icons (MIT). libmpv (GPL-2.0-or-later) is not bundled; it is loaded from your system.
Two services are queried at runtime rather than shipped, and their footing differs. The CD details come from MusicBrainz and are core data under CC0 — public domain. The cover art comes from the Cover Art Archive, and those images are not: they remain with their respective copyright owners. Only the disc id, computed from the track lengths, is sent; the disc itself is never read for the lookup.
FerrumPlay is at version 0.9.2 and in active development.