Projects
hiljaa
Why it exists
A calm, native macOS audio player. All your listening, without the tab.
Everything I listened to lived in a browser tab, and the tab was always the first thing to go. Podcasts, radio, my own files, and the audio from links I already had.
A tab is a browser, not a player, and the difference shows up within a day. It decodes a video nobody is watching. It plays one thing at a time. It forgets where you were. And it disappears the moment you tidy your windows.
So: one native app that sits in the background, keeps everything in a single queue, and doesn’t need a window open to carry on playing.
The number that shaped it
About 65 MB, against 300 MB to a gigabyte for a tab.
Most things in this category are a browser wearing a hat – ship Chromium, put a play button on it, call it an app. It works, and it costs you the better part of a gigabyte of memory to listen to a podcast.
hiljaa runs on libmpv instead of Electron. It starts in about a second, and it holds everything you listen to in roughly what one video tab spends on a single clip.
Native pays for the rest of it: a menu-bar mini player, the media keys, Control Center, per-track resume to the second so a three-hour set picks up exactly where you left it, loudness normalisation so a mixed queue never suddenly blasts you, and playback speed without the chipmunk.
The sources are the point. Podcasts by RSS, internet radio, local files, and audio from links – YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Mixcloud, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Twitch, Audiomack, Archive.org.
Where it is now
An invite-only beta.
Free while the beta runs: no account, no card. When it is finished it will be a one-time purchase and never a subscription, and the people testing it get the early price.
It goes by hiljaa – Finnish for “quiet”, and unmistakably ours. Same player, freshly rebuilt – if you were on the old beta, ask me for a new key.
The honest weak point: link sources change how they work from time to time, and playback from those can break for a day until a fix ships. Podcasts, radio and your own files are not affected. That is true of everything in this category, and pretending otherwise would be the tell.