The term gapless playback can sometimes cause confusion. It simply means that one track flows into the next without a pause, allowing seamless transitions between songs. This is particularly important for albums designed so that tracks run together. And it is by no means limited to classical music. Electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock can all be badly disrupted when artificial gaps are inserted between tracks.
For me, gapless playback is close to essential. If a music player does not support it, there is a very good chance it will go straight in the bin, regardless of how impressive its other features might be.
When I reviewed Trix Player back in February 2026, I lamented the absence of gapless playback. The developer recently contacted me to let me know that support for gapless playback has now been added, so I’ve taken the opportunity to revisit the music player.
This follow-up review should be read alongside my original review.
CachyOS is now the Linux distribution I use for most of my software evaluation. Trix Player is available through the Arch User Repository (AUR).
Installation
Recent incidents involving the AUR are a timely reminder that you should always inspect the PKGBUILD before installing a package. A PKGBUILD is effectively a set of build and installation instructions that will be executed on your system. Reading it lets you check where the source code is being downloaded from, whether patches or additional files are introduced, which commands are run, and whether anything looks unexpected or potentially malicious. Blindly installing an AUR package means placing a great deal of trust in those instructions.
The package in the AUR installs with no issues.
In Operation
I’ve constrained the terminal window purely for the screenshot.
Gapless playback is the headline addition since my original review. Trix Player’s implementation is simpler than the approach used by fooyin, but it follows the same broad principle of preparing the next track before the current one finishes. Trix keeps the next audio source ready and, when the current source reaches its end, switches to it within the audio producer thread while continuing to feed the same output buffer. fooyin takes a more elaborate mixer-level approach, splicing frames from the next track into the same processing cycle at the precise point the current track ends.
In practice, though, Trix Player now delivers the seamless track transitions I was looking for.
Trix Player has also gained Vim-style j and k navigation for moving down and up through the music library.
Summary
Trix Player now gets my recommendation. It has the essential features needed to make a good music player, including gapless playback, together with a clean, responsive keyboard-driven interface, fast track searching, seeking, shuffle and loop modes. I also like its straightforward filesystem-first approach. Point it at a music directory and it gets on with the job without demanding that you first import and manage a separate library.
The developer also deserves credit for listening to feedback and continuing to improve the player. And Trix remains incredibly frugal with resources, with ps_mem reporting memory usage of under 7 MB. That’s exceptionally low.
Website: github.com/RIZAmohammadkhan/TerminalMusicPlayer
Support:
Developer: Riza Mohammad
License: MIT License
Trix is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Music Players | |
|---|---|
| musikcube | Sublime audio engine, library, player and server written in C++ |
| tap | The lightest music player with gapless playback |
| Tizonia | Powerful cloud music player based on OpenMAX IL 1.2 written in C and C++ |
| cmus | Great set of features including the essential gapless playback |
| termusic | Music Player TUI written in Rust |
| kew | Music player written in C |
| spectrum | Simple and intuitive music player for tech enthusiasts |
| ncmpc | Frugal Music Player Daemon client |
| ncmpy | Music Player Daemon client |
| MOC | Designed to be powerful and easy to use |
| RMuP | Simple music player lacking gapless playback |
| Siren | Extremely frugal with system resources |
| grump | CLI audio player written in Go |
| Gomu | Another Go music player |
| mpvc | mpc-like control interface for mpv |
| RustPlayer | Audio and radio player written in Rust |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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