OpenRiot v7.9.6 — The One With The Proper Sound
“Vinyl is overrated. Digital is overrated. The only thing that matters is whether the music stops when you close the window.” — The OpenRiot Crew, at 2:47 AM, deleting a purple mpd client
Release Overview
v7.9.5 unified the colors. It swept up after the revolution. What it did not do was make the music player feel right. The rmpc client was functional — you could browse, you could queue, you could play — but it did not respect the listener. It was a file manager that happened to make noise.
This release fixes that. The player now behaves like something you would actually want to spend an hour inside. The visualizer lives in the browser pane. The colors match the rest of the desktop. Pressing Enter plays the song under your cursor, immediately, no ceremony. The queue is gone from the UI because you are not a DJ and you do not need to see a tracklist. And when you quit, the music stops — because the only thing more embarrassing than your taste in post-punk is your taste in post-punk leaking through the speakers after you have left the room.
Cava Visualizer in the Browser — The Folders tab is now a split.
The top 70% is the directory tree. The bottom 30% is cava, the rawest
audio visualizer that still compiles on OpenBSD. No particle effects.
No FFT fireworks. Just vertical bars that jump in time with the
kick drum. We patched cava’s configure.ac to recognize OpenBSD,
stripped the -lrt link flag (OpenBSD does not have it), and built
it from source. The binary lives in config/bin/cava and installs to
/usr/local/bin/cava via doas. MPD sends a duplicate PCM stream to
a FIFO at /tmp/mpd.fifo. cava reads from that. The result is a
modest green equalizer strip sitting under your file tree, blinking
in 4:4 time. It is not pretty. It is honest. That is why it works.
The Queue Is Dead (Long Live the Queue) — MPD still has a queue. It always will. That is how MPD works. But the Queue tab has been removed from the tab bar. You get Folders, Artists, Albums, Search. That is it. You navigate to a song, you press Enter, it plays. If you want a playlist, use a playlist. The queue tab was a crutch that turned every listening session into tracklist management. The music player is for playing music now.
Enter Means Play — <CR> in the navigation context used to run
the Confirm action — which would add the selected item to the
queue but not always start it. Now it runs Play. You are on a
song. You press Enter. That song plays. Immediately. No queue
wrangling. No wondering if it is going to start. This is how it
should have worked from the beginning.
Stop on Exit — on_exit now runs ["rmpc", "stop"]. When you
quit the player, the playback stops. The MPD daemon keeps running —
you might want to remote-control it from another client — but rmpc
stops the current track on its way out. No more discovering at 3 AM
that Pink Floyd has been playing to an empty room for six hours.
Green Theme, Green Bars — neo-tokyo.ron has been fully
converted from blue (#7aa2f7) to green (#9ECE6A) accents. The
cava theme block is configured with green bars matching the desktop
palette. The inactive tabs use dim green (#8BB85A) instead of
dim blue. The player looks like it belongs on this desktop now,
which it did not before.
Dynamic Theme Template — neo-tokyo.ron.tmpl is a new template
file with and variables. The
OpenRiot installer does not yet reference this — the static .ron
file is still the source of truth — but the template exists for
future dynamic theming, when the installer learns to render user
config from templates instead of copying static files.
Cava Binary Included — config/bin/cava is a patched,
OpenBSD-native build of cava from the upstream source. The patch to
configure.ac is one line: freebsd*|openbsd*). The Makefile fix
is one sed command: remove -lrt. This is not a fork. This is just
what it takes to build software on an operating system the upstream
maintainers forgot exists.
12 New Wallpapers — The entire backgrounds/ collection has been
refreshed. 12 new photographs replace the old set. The same locked
images in Locked/ remain — those are the lock screen selection and
they are already curated to exhaustion.
🧾 Files Changed
| File | Nature of Change |
|---|---|
config/rmpc/themes/neo-tokyo.ron |
Blue → green; cava theme |
config/rmpc/themes/neo-tokyo.ron.tmpl |
NEW: template for dynamic theming |
install/packages.yaml |
MPD FIFO; cava; keybinds; tabs; on_exit stop |
config/bin/cava |
NEW: OpenBSD-patched cava binary |
backgrounds/ |
12 new wallpapers replacing old set |
🎵 What We’re Listening To
The first rule of a good music player is that you stop thinking about the player. The second rule is that when you do look at it, it should give you something back. Cava does that. It does not pretend to be a spectrograph. It does not claim to visualize the “soul” of the music. It draws bars that go up and down. But when you are forty minutes into a Krautrock record and the motorik beat has become your heartbeat, those bars are company. They are proof that something is still happening.
Good music software should get out of the way. Albums are not tracklists. Listening is not queue management. You should not need a separate tab to see what is coming next when you are not in control of what is coming next — you are trusting the album, or the artist, or the shuffle seed, or whatever god you pray to when the bassline drops. rmpc used to feel like a tool for librarians. Now it feels like a tool for listeners.
The best thing about the visualizer is how little it demands. It is not a feature. It is a texture. You scroll through directories, the bars twitch in the corner, you find what you want, you press Enter, and the song starts. That is the whole operation. No modal dialogs. No queue confirmations. No “add to playlist” flowchart. Just a room with music in it.
🗣️ Final Words
“The best music player is the one you forget you are using. This one was not. Now it is closer.” — The OpenRiot Crew, closing rmpc for the last time tonight
v7.9.6 is the release where the music player started acting like it was part of the desktop instead of an import from another universe. The colors match. The visualizer blinks. Enter plays what you point at. Exit stops the noise. The queue is alive in MPD’s memory and dead in the UI where it belongs.
If you install this and still find yourself staring at a tracklist, congratulations — you are a curator, not a listener. Everyone else gets a green room with green bars and a motorik kick drum.
— The OpenRiot Crew
“Your desktop should have a personality color. Your music player should not have a personality. It should have your music. And it should stop when you leave the room.”