riptune

Rip and tune. A terminal-native music client for Subsonic-compatible servers (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic), built for the niri scrollable-tiling compositor. Because if id Software's engine can run on a smart fridge, your music player can run on a compositor IPC socket.

Why

Most terminal music clients treat the desktop as a black box: no MPRIS, no awareness of tiling layout, no way to hook into compositor-level keybinds. riptune is built the other way around, it assumes it's running inside a modern Wayland tiling setup and integrates accordingly.

Features

MPRIS2 D-Bus interface — waybar, GNOME/KDE media widgets, and hardware media keys control riptune out of the box, no riptune-specific config needed on their end.
Decoupled async pipeline — network I/O (tokio) and audio decode/playback (dedicated OS thread) never share a runtime, so a slow server response can't stutter playback or freeze the UI.
niri IPC integration — listens on niri's event-stream socket (not polling) to react to workspace changes; exposes a local control socket so niri keybinds can trigger in-app actions like favoriting a track.
Local SQLite index — the remote library is mirrored locally so the TUI opens instantly, even on servers with slow getArtists/getAlbum responses over large libraries.

Architecture

flowchart TB
    subgraph Main["Main Thread"]
        TUI["TUI (ratatui)<br/>render loop, input handling"]
    end

    subgraph AudioThread["Dedicated OS Thread"]
        Decoder["symphonia decoder"]
        Sink["cpal output stream"]
        Decoder --> Sink
    end

    subgraph Tokio["Tokio Runtime"]
        Subsonic["Subsonic client<br/>(reqwest)"]
        Cache["SQLite cache<br/>(sqlx)"]
        Mpris["MPRIS2 server<br/>(zbus)"]
        Niri["niri IPC listener<br/>(event-stream socket)"]
    end

    TUI <-- "AppEvent (mpsc)" --> Tokio
    TUI <-- "reads local state" --> Cache
    Tokio -- "AudioCommand (mpsc)" --> AudioThread
    AudioThread -- "AudioEvent: position, buffering" --> TUI
    Subsonic -- "sync_library()" --> Cache
    Subsonic -- "authenticated stream URL" --> AudioThread
    Mpris -- "translates D-Bus calls into" --> Tokio
    Niri -- "WorkspaceChanged" --> TUI

    External1["waybar / notification daemon"] -.->|D-Bus| Mpris
    External2["niri compositor"] -.->|IPC socket| Niri

Why three execution contexts instead of one? Audio playback is latency-sensitive in a way that async task scheduling doesn't guarantee a busy tokio runtime (e.g. mid-sync with the server) shouldn't be able to introduce a buffer underrun. Giving audio its own OS thread with a bounded channel as the only interface makes that impossible by construction, not by careful scheduling.

Repository layout

riptune/
├── src/                 # binary crate: wires everything together
│   ├── main.rs
│   ├── app.rs           # async orchestration (tokio runtime)
│   ├── audio.rs         # audio thread entrypoint
│   ├── config.rs
│   └── events.rs
├── crates/
│   ├── riptune-core/     # Subsonic REST client, auth, models
│   ├── riptune-cache/    # SQLite local index
│   ├── riptune-mpris/    # MPRIS2 D-Bus server
│   ├── riptune-niri/     # niri IPC event-stream listener
│   └── riptune-tui/      # ratatui UI
├── Cargo.toml            # workspace root
└── config.example.toml

Configuration

~/.config/riptune/config.toml:

[server]
url = "https://music.example.com"
username = "you"
# Either a legacy Subsonic password (salted-token auth is computed at runtime,
# never sent in the clear) or a Navidrome API key, depending on server support.
password = "your-password-or-api-key"

[niri]
enabled = true
workspace_notifications = true

[cache]
path = "~/.cache/riptune/library.sqlite"

Building

cargo build --release

Requires a D-Bus session bus (for MPRIS) and, optionally, a running niri instance (for IPC features — riptune degrades gracefully without them).

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