Timp

A small, native, album-art-forward music player written in C with raylib.

Borderless single window with a Hi-Fi look: large cover art, anti-aliased typography, an accent color sampled from the artwork, a live spectrum, a 10-band EQ, a slide-out saveable playlist drawer, and synced lyrics. Audio is decoded by miniaudio (MP3 / FLAC / OGG / WAV, Unicode paths). No installer, no runtime, no telemetry — raylib is linked statically, so the whole app is a single timp.exe.

Features

• Formats — MP3, FLAC, OGG/Vorbis, WAV (whatever miniaudio decodes)
• Unicode paths — file open and decoding go through the Win32 wide API, so non-ASCII folders and filenames work end to end
• Album art — embedded covers (ID3v2 APIC, FLAC PICTURE) → a sibling cover.jpg / folder.jpg → a generated gradient; the accent color is sampled from the artwork
• Lyrics — synced .lrc (karaoke-style highlight), plain .txt, embedded ID3 USLT / Vorbis LYRICS, and an online lrclib.net fallback fetched on a background thread
• Visualizers — click the album art to cycle cover → spectrum bars → waveform; a mini spectrum sits under the title
• Playlist drawer — the queue lives in a panel that slides out the left or right side (your choice in Settings), extending the window beside the player. Drag files or a folder in (appends), drag rows to reorder, double-click to play, hover for a remove ×, or clear it
• Saved playlists — name and save the queue as a standard .m3u8 (UTF-8, absolute paths — so it opens in other players and survives across drives), reopen it from an in-app library, and overwrite with a confirm; stored in %APPDATA%\Timp\Playlists\
• 10-band equalizer — 60 / 170 / 310 / 600 Hz / 1 / 3 / 6 / 12 / 14 / 16 kHz, with ON / FLAT
• Transport — play/pause, prev/next, drag-to-scrub seeking, volume, fixed-order shuffle (the whole list is shuffled once; next/prev follow that order), and 3-state repeat (off / one / all)
• Tags — title / artist / album read from ID3v2 and Vorbis comments (UTF-8 / UTF-16, full Latin + Turkish glyph coverage)
• System integration — system-wide media keys, always-on-top, and a procedurally-drawn app/taskbar icon
• Persistent settings — volume, EQ, always-on-top, playlist side, and window position are saved to %APPDATA%\Timp\config.ini
• Polished window — borderless with anti-aliased, rounded corners (Win11 DWM) and no console window
• Tiny — pure C11 + raylib + miniaudio, statically linked into one exe

Screenshots

Queue — reorder / remove / clear	10-band EQ
Synced lyrics	Settings

Building

Dependencies

• A C11 compiler (MSYS2 MinGW-w64 gcc) and pkg-config
• raylib (mingw-w64-x86_64-raylib)
• miniaudio.h and stb_image.h — fetched automatically by setup.ps1

Windows (MSYS2 / MinGW64)

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-pkgconf mingw-w64-x86_64-raylib
.\build.ps1
.\build\timp.exe

build.ps1 fetches the vendored headers on first run, compiles incrementally, embeds the .exe icon, and links a standalone timp.exe (no DLLs to ship).

Fonts are currently loaded from C:\Windows\Fonts (Segoe UI), so the build targets Windows. Bundling an open font would make it cross-platform.

The build tooling is three small scripts:

Script	Does
setup.ps1	Fetches the vendored headers (miniaudio.h, stb_image.h) into vendor/. Run automatically by build.ps1.
build.ps1	Compiles src/*.c and links the standalone build\timp.exe.
installer.ps1	Packages timp.exe into a Windows Setup.exe via Forge + forge.toml (installs to Program Files with shortcuts). Optional — needs the Forge toolchain.

Usage

• Drop files or a folder onto the window to enqueue them, or click + (top-left) for the native open dialog.
• Click the album art to cycle through the cover and the visualizers.
• Top bar: + open · ≡ playlist drawer · sliders EQ · gear settings · ♪ lyrics.
• Playlist drawer — ≡ or Q slides it out beside the player. Double-click a row to play, drag rows to reorder, hover for the ×, Save to store the list as a named playlist, or Open to load a saved one.
• Seek by dragging the progress bar; volume via its slider, the mouse wheel, or ↑ / ↓.

Keyboard

Key	Action
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Seek −5s / +5s
↑ / ↓	Volume up / down
O	Open file dialog
Q / E / G / Y	Queue / EQ / Settings / Lyrics panel
S / L	Shuffle / cycle repeat
T	Always on top
Media keys	Play/Pause, Stop, Prev, Next (system-wide)

Lyrics

For the playing track, Timp looks for lyrics in this order:

1. a sibling .lrc file (synced — shows a karaoke-style highlight),
2. a sibling .txt file (plain, scrollable),
3. embedded lyrics (ID3v2 USLT / Vorbis LYRICS),
4. lrclib.net — an online lookup by artist / title / duration, fetched in the background (shows "Searching lyrics…" while it runs).

Configuration

config.ini lives in %APPDATA%\Timp\. Persisted keys:

volume = 0.700
always_on_top = 0
eq_enabled = 0
eq0 = 0.00          # … eq9 — per-band gains
playlist_side = 0   # 0 = drawer on the right, 1 = on the left
win_x = ...
win_y = ...

Saved playlists are standard .m3u8 files in %APPDATA%\Timp\Playlists\ (use Settings → Open folder to reveal it).

Project layout

src/
  rl_main.c      window, event loop, UI, all panels (raylib)
  audio.c        miniaudio engine — thread-safe decode, Unicode paths
  art.c          embedded + folder cover-art extraction & decode
  tags.c         ID3v2 / Vorbis metadata + embedded lyrics
  lyrics.c       .lrc / .txt parsing + lrclib.net online fetch (WinHTTP)
  osdialog.c     native open dialog + DWM rounded corners
  rlconfig.c     persistent %APPDATA% settings
  mediakeys.c    system-wide media-key hotkeys
  eq.c / fft.c   10-band EQ + spectrum FFT
  playlist.c     queue / index + fixed-order shuffle
  playlistio.c   save / load / list .m3u8 playlists
  icon.h         procedural app icon (window icon + .ico + installer)
  vendor_ma.c    miniaudio implementation unit
vendor/          miniaudio.h, stb_image.h (fetched)
assets/timp.ico  embedded Windows executable icon
examples/        screenshots used in this README

Credits

• Author — Şamil Bülbül
• raylib — window, input, rendering (zlib license)
• miniaudio — audio decode + output (public domain / MIT-0)
• stb_image — cover-art decoding (public domain / MIT)
• lrclib.net — community lyrics database

All code written for this project is released into the public domain.