A lightweight, dark, keyboard-driven music sorter for triaging large libraries. Point it at a folder, then shuffle, audition, delete to trash, and quick-move tracks into target folders without ever lifting your hands off the keyboard. Built as a native GTK4 / GStreamer application - one small binary, no Electron, no embedded browser.

The palette is deliberately warm and very dark: easy on the eyes at night, dim enough to leave running while you fall asleep (as I tend to do this before bed, lol), but every control stays legible. Everything - colours, settings, keybindings, quick-move slots - is editable inside the app and in a single persistent config file, in the spirit of mpv.

Features

• Load a library via the folder picker or a path argument (recurses into subfolders by default).
• Shuffle the whole library, keeping the current track playing.
• Delete → OS trash, never a permanent unlink. Press D; undo with U.
• Quick-move slots - pin a target folder to each slot, then move the playing file there instantly with the number keys. Configurable from 1 to 9 slots; assign a folder with Ctrl+number or the pencil button on each slot.
• Right-click "Move to…" - right-click the player or any track in the list to move it to a quick slot, a recent destination, or any folder you browse to. Recent destinations are remembered automatically (the count is configurable).
• Multi-level undo for deletes and moves (U / Ctrl+Z). Trashed files are pulled back out of the freedesktop trash; moved files are returned.
• Waveform + scrubbing - peaks are extracted with GStreamer and drawn with Cairo; click or drag anywhere on the wave to seek. J/L seek back/forward.
• Auto-advance to the next track when one ends (toggleable).
• Optional visualizer with several muted themes (V), fed by GStreamer's spectrum element.
• Metadata (ID3/tag) editing - tags are read always; editing is off by default and enabled with a settings toggle (E). Powered by lofty for audio formats and midly for MIDI (title maps to the MIDI TrackName meta-event). Works across formats, including .mid/.midi.
• MIDI support - .mid and .midi files load and play back via GStreamer's MIDI synth pipeline. Format, track count, BPM, time signature, key, and instrument names appear in the player subtitle when present in the file. The waveform display shows a note density graph so you can still scrub through the track.
• Everything is configurable - General / Keybindings / Quick slots / Theme tabs, plus a raw Config file editor for total control. Rebind any action to any key; codes are physical-key based, so layout and numpad keys behave predictably.
• Handles all common audio formats (mp3, flac, ogg, opus, wav, m4a/aac, aiff, wma, …) plus MIDI (.mid/.midi). Playback depends on the installed GStreamer plugins; file operations work regardless.

Install

Ubuntu / Debian — .deb package

Each release also includes a .deb built for Ubuntu/Debian. Download it and install with:

sudo apt install ./tunesort_*_amd64.deb

This handles runtime dependencies.

Prebuilt binary (Linux x86_64)

Each release includes a prebuilt tunesort binary for 64-bit Linux (glibc), built on the latest Ubuntu. Download the tarball, verify it, and drop the binary on your PATH:

tar -xzf tunesort-*-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
install -Dm755 tunesort ~/.local/bin/tunesort

The prebuilt binary dynamically links GTK4, libadwaita and GStreamer, so you still need those runtime libraries installed (see below). Because it is built against one specific distro's library versions, it may not run on older or very different systems - building from source is the recommended path and the only one guaranteed to match your machine. Don't blindly trust a binary you didn't build; the SHA256SUMS.txt in each release lets you at least confirm you downloaded what was published.

Runtime libraries on Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt install libgtk-4-1 libadwaita-1-0 \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav

Build from source (recommended)

You need the Rust toolchain plus the GTK4 / libadwaita / GStreamer development packages. On Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt install build-essential libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev \
    libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/tunesort ~/.local/bin/tunesort

The GStreamer plugin packages are runtime dependencies for playback (the -good/-bad/-ugly/libav sets between them cover mp3, aac/m4a, flac, ogg, opus, wav and more).

Run

tunesort                  # open the app
tunesort ~/Music          # load a library on start

Default keybindings

Key	Action	Key	Action
Space / K	Play / pause	D	Delete → trash
→	Next track	S	Shuffle
←	Previous track	U / Ctrl+Z	Undo last delete/move
↑ / ↓	Volume up / down	O	Open library
L / J	Seek forward / back	,	Settings
M	Mute	V	Toggle visualizer
1–9 / numpad	Quick-move to slot	E	Toggle metadata editor
Ctrl+1–9 (numpad)	Assign folder to slot

All of these are remappable in Settings → Keybindings.

Configuration

The config lives at ~/.config/tunesort/config.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME). It is written whenever you change something in the app, and re-read on launch. You can edit it by hand, or from Settings → Config file - invalid JSON is rejected, and unknown or missing keys are merged against the defaults so upgrades never wipe your edits.

Top-level keys: library_path, settings, theme, quickslots, recent_destinations, keybindings. The number of active quick slots (quickslot_count) and how many recent destinations to remember (max_recent_destinations) live under settings. See src/config.rs for the full default set.

How it works

• src/config.rs - load / save / merge of the JSON config.
• src/library.rs - scanning, shuffle, trash / move with a multi-level undo stack.
• src/metadata.rs - lofty tag read / write for audio; midly tag read / write for MIDI (reads TrackName, Tempo, KeySignature and more for display; writes TrackName for the editable title field).
• src/player.rs - a GStreamer playbin wrapper for playback, async waveform peak extraction, MIDI note-density waveform fallback, and the spectrum-fed visualizer.
• src/ui.rs - the GTK4 UI, the action registry, and keyboard dispatch.
• src/main.rs - entry point and application bootstrap.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.