curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/korrykatti/ektara/main/install.sh | sh

Ektara

A music player that lives in your terminal. Play the mp3s you already own, stream anything from YouTube when you don't, and let Discord quietly tell people what's playing.

Go works on Linux

Why Ektara?

Ektara is named after a traditional Indian one-stringed folk instrument. Ek means one, taar means string, and it felt right for a player that is one window, a keyboard, and your music.

How it works

Download a song by name. Ektara searches YouTube, saves the audio as mp3, and plays it from disk from then on.
Stream instead, when you want to hear something once and save nothing.
Browse your library. Everything you have saved and everything you have played is one keystroke away.
Queue freely. Pile up tracks in any order, shuffle or repeat the queue, and add more while the current song is still playing.
Discord knows. The song, its cover art and a running clock show up in your rich presence while you listen.
Lyrics that follow the music. Words come from LRCLIB, timed line by line, and the line being sung is picked out as the song goes. Instrumental tracks say so.
Genres, when they can be found. Ektara asks MusicBrainz once for the playing track's song and artist and shows up to three genres under the title. It is best-effort: no match means no genre, not a guess. Answers are remembered and playback never waits for the lookup.
Cover art in the terminal. Album pictures are rendered in braille characters, two pixels per cell, so the colour survives the plain text.

Keys

Everything runs from the keyboard. The arrows and j/k move through lists, arrows seek, and the rest is here if you need it:

↑ ↓ / j k	move through a list
enter	pick it
tab	in the search box, move to the optional artist
e	add it to the queue without interrupting what is playing
p	pause
← →	seek five seconds, or scroll the lyrics while they are open
l	lyrics for the track playing, following the music; works from any screen but the search box
+ / -	on the lyrics screen, shift the words 0.1s later or earlier instead of changing the volume
r	on the lyrics screen, reset that shift; elsewhere, repeat
a d	previous and next track
s r	shuffle and repeat
m + -	mute and volume
esc	back
ctrl+c	quit, from anywhere

Getting started

The one-line installer at the top checks for Go 1.27+, a C compiler and libmpv, fetches the source, builds it, and puts the binary in ~/.local/bin. Nothing outside your home directory is written.

wget -qO- works too, and BINDIR changes where the binary goes. ffmpeg is optional, needed only for downloading; yt-dlp is fetched automatically the first time you search.

There are no prebuilt binaries: installing means building from source. Or clone the repository and run ./build.sh run if you prefer a checkout.

A note on where it runs: Ektara is developed and tested on Linux, and that's the honest edge of its support for now. Other systems are possible but nobody has sat down and checked.

Source

github / korrykatti/ektara back home