A modern Music Player Daemon based on Rockbox firmware
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
HN · launched May 9, 2026 · 123 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views
Niche: desktop music players · 99 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -29% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Vertical SaaS
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 99 launches in desktop music players →
Could you build this?
No Porting and embedding legacy Rockbox firmware audio decoding and playback logic into a standalone Music Player Daemon requires complex low-level C and audio systems programming.
What it would actually take: The project requires extracting Rockbox's DSP, codec plugins, and playback core from embedded C code and wrapping them in a cross-platform daemon architecture. It must implement the MPD protocol over TCP/UNIX sockets while routing PCM audio output via ALSA, PulseAudio, or PipeWire. This demands specialized domain knowledge in digital signal processing, audio codecs, and legacy embedded C systems.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Rocksky (AT Protocol-based scrobbling platform), Last.fm, Libre.fm, ListenBrainz, MPD (Music Player Daemon)
Concerns raised: Tidal's macOS app doesn't use native APIs, Last.fm has been a ghost town for over a decade, Limited hardware support compared to Sansa Clip+ era
Feature requests: Stream from Tidal, HTTP streaming capability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 2362 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #197 of 2363 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 190 days after the earliest competitor.
- riff · github · 2026-10-04 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- spotish · github · 2026-11-08 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- mygo-music · github · 2026-11-04 · 954 upvotes · similarity 0.72
- chilpa · github · 2026-09-25 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- kraken-player · github · 2026-09-16 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Crate · hn · 2026-07-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Rocksky · hn · 2026-05-16 · 117 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- I made a music player inspired by late 90s peer-to-peer sharing · hn · 2026-08-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.65
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.