phiola - audio player, recorder, converter

[freakazoid]

phiola is the successor audio player to fmedia.

Website: https://github.com/stsaz/phiola/

Description:

[Phiola] can play audio files from your device or remote server, record audio from your microphone or Internet radio stream, process and convert audio into another format, and more. Its low CPU consumption conserves the notebook/phone battery. You can issue commands to phiola via its CLI, TUI, GUI, system pipe and SDK interfaces. Its fast startup time allows using it from custom scripts on a "play-and-exit" or "record-and-exit" basis. It's completely portable (all codecs are bundled) - you can run it directly from a read-only flash drive. It's a free and open-source project, and you can use it as a standalone application or as a library for your own software.

Also has versions available for Android and Linux.



Features:

- Play audio: .mp3, .ogg(Vorbis/Opus), .mp4/.mov(AAC/ALAC/MPEG), .mkv/.webm(AAC/ALAC/MPEG/Vorbis/Opus/PCM), .caf(AAC/ALAC/PCM), .avi(AAC/MPEG/PCM), .aac, .mpc; .flac, .ape, .wv, .wav.
- Record audio: .m4a(AAC), .ogg, .opus; .flac, .wav
- Convert audio
- List/search file meta tags; edit MP3 tags
- List available audio devices
- Input: file, directory, HTTP/HTTPS URL, console (stdin), playlists: .m3u, .pls, .cue
- Command Line Interface for Desktop OS
- Terminal/Console UI for interaction at runtime
- GUI for Windows, Linux, Android
- Instant startup time: very short initial delay until the audio starts playing (e.g. Linux/PulseAudio: TUI: ~25ms, GUI: ~50ms)
- Fast (low footprint): keeps your CPU, memory & disk I/O at absolute minimum; spends 99% of time inside codec algorithms

Portable instructions:

- Download the Windows .zip version from https://github.com/stsaz/phiola/releases/latest
- Extract and go to the /mod/gui/ directory and create an empty user.conf file. This will tell phiola to store its settings in the app's directory instead of in %appdata%
- Launch phiola-gui.exe

Mini-review: If you liked fmedia, you'll like phiola as they are basically the same. One change is phiola can play web radio stations with HTTPS, fmedia could only play unencrypted HTTP ones before. If you like no-frills GUI audio players that barely use any CPU, this is one to keep an eye on. Bonus is you can play your audio from the command-line.

[freakazoid]

MQA is hardware-dependent. If your audio set up supports MQA, you should use foobar2000 to play it.

As for DSD, I have only one DSD album encoded with WavPack and phiola doesn't work with it. Both foobar2000 and XMPlay work though, but you'll need to install some addons to make it work. Again, you should make sure your audio set up can play back hi-resolution audio otherwise there's no point attempting to play these files.

[encedogsled]

It derives from bespoke scripts on a "play-and-exit" or "record-and-exit" framework. It is entirely portable (all codecs are included) - it may be executed straight from a read-only flash drive. This is a free and open-source project that may be used either as a standalone application or as a library for your own software development.