In Operation
Here’s an image of hihat in action.
There’s basic functionality available including album art, search, shuffle, repeat, and iTunes-like sorting.
What’s the first thing we test using a music player? If you’ve read any of our other music player reviews, you’ll know it’s gapless playback.
The term gapless playback sometimes causes confusion. Gapless playback means tracks flow into the next song without pause. This allows seamless transitions from track to track. This is so important for albums that were designed to have the tracks run together. It’s not just classical music that so often mandates gapless playback. Listening to electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock is often ruined when artificial gaps are inserted between tracks.
hihat doesn’t offer gapless playback. That’s a showstopper for many audio enthusiasts.
Summary
If you’re looking for a minimalist offline music player, we cannot possibly recommend hihat. Not by a long chalk. Functionality is really very limited, there’s no gapless playback, and very few redeeming qualities. There are so many better music players available for Linux. Here’s our verdict on the best music players.
As you’d expect from an Electron-based program, hihat is not lightweight in its memory footprint. With our standard small MP3 library of Creative Commons licensed music, hihat consumes nearly 900MB of RAM according to ps_mem. That’s not an unsurprising result but it’s pretty terrible.
If you’re running an Arch-based distro, at least you won’t waste a lot of time installing the software.
Website: github.com/johnnyshankman/hihat
Support:
Developer: hihat
License: MIT License
hihat is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary