1 pointby jaccon2 days ago2 comments
  • jaccon2 days ago
    Hi HN,

    I've been working on a desktop media player called BlackBird.

    The idea started from a simple frustration: modern music/video consumption is almost entirely browser-based or streaming-centric, while local libraries are often poorly supported by modern tools. I wanted something that feels closer to the old Winamp/Foobar era, but built with a modern stack and capable of handling large libraries efficiently.

    BlackBird is a desktop media player focused on local media, but with some integrations that bridge offline and online content.

    Some features so far:

    Library management

    Recursive folder import for music and video files

    Automatic extraction of ID3 metadata

    Album artwork detection and storage

    Fast indexing using SQLite

    YouTube integration

    Add a YouTube link directly to the library

    Metadata fetched via oEmbed

    Playback through an embedded overlay player

    Organization

    Views for Songs, Albums, Artists and Videos

    Playlist creation with drag & drop

    Favorites

    Deep search across title, artist, genre and metadata

    Editing

    Built-in metadata editor

    Replace artwork locally

    Update tags without leaving the player

    Playback

    Universal queue mixing local files and YouTube items

    Shuffle and repeat modes

    Multi-select operations for large libraries

    Customization

    Theme system based on JSON files

    Full export/import of settings, playlists and metadata

    From a technical perspective:

    Electron for the desktop runtime

    Vite for fast builds and development

    better-sqlite3 for synchronous, high-performance local database operations

    UI built with vanilla TypeScript/JS and CSS to avoid heavy frameworks inside Electron

    The goal was to keep the UI responsive even with large libraries, while keeping the architecture relatively simple.

    I'm still iterating on it and would love feedback from people who care about desktop apps, media libraries, or Electron performance.

    If you're curious, I'm happy to share more details about the architecture, indexing strategy, or performance benchmarks.

  • harrisonpage2 days ago
    Suggestion: Add a screenshot or two to the README