Olivier

A music player for a local, MusicBrainz-tagged collection, built for Linux desktop. Its defining feature is bilingual-aware display: for music whose metadata is in a non-Latin script (e.g. Japanese), Olivier shows the original alongside a romanized reading and/or an English translation, so you can read, search, and sort your library either way.

Under the hood it's Flutter (UI + audio) over a Rust core via flutter_rust_bridge: Rust owns file scanning, tag reading (lofty), MusicBrainz enrichment, and the SQLite catalog; Dart drives the UI and the audio engine (just_audio / media_kit / audio_service).

Screenshots

Browsing the library — artists, albums, and tracks, each shown bilingually with album art:

The expanded queue — 1-based order numbers, the now-playing row highlighted, and the transport / seek bar along the bottom:

Features

• Bilingual-aware display. Original script + romanized reading + translation for tracks, albums, and artists. Set a per-artist reading and sort override when MusicBrainz doesn't have one.
• Three-pane browser. Artists → albums → tracks in resizable panes, with album art and per-track length, date added, and last played.
• MusicBrainz enrichment. Artist/album/track metadata is fetched and cached; MBIDs are clickable links back to musicbrainz.org. Re-fetch a single artist or album from its right-click menu.
• Fast search. Incremental search matches the original, the reading, and the translation at once — type shiina or 椎名 and both find Shiina Ringo. Focus it with Ctrl/Cmd+F.
• Queue. Drag albums or tracks in, reorder, remove, and see each track's position. Expand it to a full-window view; a now-playing bar with a seek slider and transport controls sits along the bottom. "Shuffle entire library" fills the queue in random track order and plays from the top.
• Playlists. Persistent, named playlists with a dedicated page (create, rename, reorder, remove tracks) and an "Add to playlist…" entry on artist/album/track menus.
• System integration. Playback exposes MPRIS controls, so your desktop's media keys and now-playing widgets work.
• Library management. Scan folders, or "Check for new music" to import only files new to the catalog without a full rescan. Re-read on-disk tags, remove items from the library, and review an import decision log (de-dupe and enrichment choices) from Settings.
• Keyboard-driven. See the shortcuts below.

Installing

Olivier targets Linux desktop. Each tagged release publishes packages on the Releases page:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install ./olivier_*.deb

# Fedora
sudo dnf install ./olivier-*.rpm

# Any distro — extract and run
tar xzf olivier-*-linux-x64.tar.gz && ./olivier-*-linux-x64/olivier

Playback needs libmpv at runtime (libmpv2 on Debian/Ubuntu, mpv-libs on Fedora). The .deb and .rpm declare it as a dependency; for the tarball, install it yourself.

To build from source instead, see Development.

Usage

1. Point it at your music. Open Settings (the gear, top right) → Add folder and choose your music root. Olivier scans the folder, reads tags, and enriches the catalog from MusicBrainz. Later, use Check for new music to pick up newly-added files quickly.
2. Browse. Pick an artist on the left to see their albums; pick an album to see its tracks. Everything renders bilingually when alternate readings/translations exist.
3. Play. Drag a track or album into the queue, or use the right-click menu to Play or Add to queue. Control playback from the now-playing bar at the bottom.
4. Search with Ctrl/Cmd+F and type in any script.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Space	Play / pause
Ctrl/Cmd+← / →	Previous / next track
Ctrl/Cmd+↑ / ↓	Volume down / up (±5%)
Shift+← / →	Seek back / forward 10s
Ctrl/Cmd+F	Focus search
Ctrl+Q	Quit

(The on-screen ⏮ button restarts the current track; Ctrl/Cmd+← jumps to the previous track. Shortcuts yield to a focused text field, so they won't fire while you're typing in search.)

Development

Tools are pinned in mise.toml (Flutter, ninja, flutter_rust_bridge_codegen, nfpm, and the precious lint stack). Install mise, then from the repo root:

mise install

Rust (via rustup) is managed outside mise. System libraries for the Linux desktop build (Ubuntu/Debian):

sudo apt-get install -y clang cmake pkg-config libgtk-3-dev liblzma-dev \
    libstdc++-14-dev libmpv-dev

Common tasks

# Run the app (Linux desktop)
just run                 # wraps: mise exec -- flutter run -d linux

# Flutter + Rust tests
mise exec -- flutter test
cd rust && cargo test

# Lint / auto-format everything (clippy, rustfmt, dart, prettier, taplo, typos, ...)
just lint --all
just tidy --all

# Build the release packages locally (.deb, .rpm, .tar.gz under dist/)
just package

# Regenerate the Dart<->Rust bindings after changing the Rust API
mise exec -- flutter_rust_bridge_codegen generate

# Regenerate the test audio fixtures (needs ffmpeg + python mutagen)
./scripts/make-fixtures.sh

Releases are cut by pushing a v* tag (e.g. git tag v0.1.0 && git push origin v0.1.0), which builds the Linux bundle and publishes the .deb/.rpm/tarball to GitHub Releases. The original design notes live under docs/superpowers/.

License

Apache-2.0.