Show HN: Nighthawk: A stealthy, simple, unobtrusive music player

quantummkv | 64 points

As a developer I completely understand the appeal of Electron. I love web technologies and targeting 3 platforms at once is amazing.

As a user, I simply won’t accept it. Platform integration is suboptimal at best and resource usage is preposterous.

If this is the future of desktop software, and it seems like it is, we have got to find a better solution.

There has to be a way to share the rendering engine and Node process among the many Electron apps that are proliferating on the user’s machine.

tambourine_man | 6 years ago

I'm typically the defender of electron on these threads. I think its a great way for devs to get an MVP out there quickly. But there is a time and a place for electron.

electron good - IDEs, markdown editors, visual git clients, things that are front and center

electron bad - music players, tray notifiers, app launchers, things that work in the background

On windows and mac I use foobar for music and greenshot for screen grabs because they use minimal resources.

roryisok | 6 years ago
anotherevan | 6 years ago

I see a lot of negative comments on these electron threads (rightfully so, especially if one cares about resources / performance). Question is: what other frameworks would you recommend for developing cross-platform desktop apps ?

zabana | 6 years ago

Has anyone else tried deadbeef? It's one of the lightest players I've ever used. It's very bare bones.

http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

Something1234 | 6 years ago

Something something electron bad

cift | 6 years ago

WinAmp can hide in the tray too, and uses 3 (!!) orders of magnitude less RAM than this. I know it is not new and shiny, but it still works well.

dmitrygr | 6 years ago

Nighthawk looks very nice!

However, I found out that for me tui is where it's at for music players. Using cmus combined with a drop down terminal such as tilda or a tiling windows manager is the most comfortable i've been with music players.

gilmi | 6 years ago

You can't throw folders with subfolders at it to make a playlist out of them. The music files have to be in the same folder. Where's the unobtrusive in that if I have to create my playlist first?

giorgosts | 6 years ago

hey is anyone interested in building a modern frontend for Foobar2000?

edit:

I think from the Foobar2000 sdk alone, you'd see how advanced that thing is.. I mean, extension points everywhere, dsp plugin support, built-in query & library management, codecs, gapless processing, all of that written in a scalable & native architecture.

It truly lacks a proper UI toolkit though. The current options are quite outdated that I'd rather fall back to the default Win32 UI.

So, Electron frontend + C/S communication with Foobar2000? I'd totally buy into it.

v-yadli | 6 years ago

> Finally after months of development, procrastination and a complete rewrite, the First stable release is out

It's a good occasion to change the "Hello world" window title.

dvfjsdhgfv | 6 years ago

Is there a subsonic interface/client that integrates nicely natively? Having to have it in a browser tab and not having music hotkeys is kind of a bitch.

antihero | 6 years ago

I just tried it and compared with Winamp 5.666 - 10mb download, 14mb memory footprint.

Dolores12 | 6 years ago

It doesn't seem to work with flac and wav files. Tried on windows.

rootlocus | 6 years ago

gorgeous UI

johnwheeler | 6 years ago

> Unobtrusive

Well besides eating half your RAM and melting down your battery.

Rjevski | 6 years ago

Electron? No thanks.

znpy | 6 years ago