A lightweight, native Windows music player written in C++ with the Win32 API. No frameworks, no web tech — just a single .cpp file and a pure Win32 UI.
- Audio formats: MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG (Vorbis), AAC, M4A, WMA, Opus
- Decoding: MediaFoundation (all formats) + stb_vorbis.h (OGG fallback)
- Output: WASAPI shared mode with automatic sample rate conversion
- 10-band equalizer with custom spline-based frequency curve and presets
- Crossfading between tracks (gapless transition)
- Repeat modes: normal, repeat one, repeat all
- Volume control with mute toggle
- Seek bar with click-to-seek and drag
- macOS-style glass blur — DWM acrylic blur that shows content from behind the window (like macOS frosted glass)
- Rainbow cycling title bar with smooth feed-in / feed-out fade animation
- Peak visualization bar with cached rendering
- Modern uniform icons — all control buttons are the same size with clean, consistent styling
- Dark / light theme support
- Compact mode — minimal player with track title, time, and playback controls
- Playlist browser with embedded album art thumbnails
- Always-visible search bar with clear (X) button
- SystemMediaTransportControls (SMTC) — appears in Windows Quick Settings / Action Center media panel (like Firefox)
- Global media hotkeys — FN + Play/Pause, FN + Next, FN + Previous, FN + Stop work even when the app is not focused
- AppUserModelID — registered for proper Windows media session association
- System tray icon — minimize to tray instead of taskbar (optional)
- Drag & drop files and folders onto the window
- Search / filter playlist in real time
- Metadata caching — background scanning of ID3 tags, durations, and album art
- "Load All" — cache metadata for the entire playlist
- Context menu — play, play next, remove, show in Explorer, properties
- Accent color picker with 14 preset colors + custom color dialog
- Blur intensity slider for acrylic glass effect
- Window opacity slider
- Minimize to tray instead of taskbar
- Start in compact mode option
- Rainbow title toggle
- Settings saved to Windows registry (portable)
- Acrylic blur — removed
WS_EX_LAYEREDwhich was conflicting with DWM blur; now shows blurred content from behind the window correctly - "Load All" showed 0b — settings window now refreshes to show the actual cached metadata size
- Changing output device restarted music — output switch now resumes playback at the same timestamp instead of starting from the beginning
- Minimize crash — guards against invalid window dimensions when minimized; no more crash/close on minimize
- Repeat mode icons — off / one / all now update correctly when clicking the shuffle button
- UI lag / 5 FPS — persistent backbuffer, cached bitmaps for rainbow title, glass overlay, button icons, and visualizer brush; no per-frame GDI object creation
- Search UI bugs — always-visible search bar with clear button; fixed row-click indexing for filtered results
- Rainbow title bar — smooth fade-in / fade-out instead of snapping on/off; tiles seamlessly across the window
- Icon size mismatch — all control buttons now uniformly sized with proportional icons
- Windows 10 or later (for acrylic blur, SMTC, and modern SDK features)
- Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
- Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0 or later)
- Open
LitePlayerCPP.sln - Select Release | Win32 from the configuration dropdown
- Build → Build Solution (or
F7)
The project can be built directly with cl.exe from the Windows Build Tools:
vcvarsall.bat x86
rc.exe /r /fo obj\LitePlayerCPP.res LitePlayerCPP.rc
cl /nologo /EHsc /W3 /O2 /DUNICODE /D_UNICODE /DWIN32 /D_WINDOWS main.cpp ^
/link /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /OUT:bin\LitePlayerCPP.exe obj\LitePlayerCPP.res ^
user32.lib gdi32.lib advapi32.lib shell32.lib comctl32.lib comdlg32.lib ole32.lib oleaut32.lib uuid.lib shlwapi.lib ^
gdiplus.lib mfreadwrite.lib mfplat.lib mfuuid.lib mmdevapi.lib runtimeobject.lib propsys.lib dwmapi.libThe output binary is placed in bin\LitePlayerCPP.exe.
- Win32 (x86) only — the project is configured for 32-bit builds. To build x64, add a new solution platform in Visual Studio.
- The project uses
v143platform toolset (VS 2022). For older VS versions, retarget the solution in the IDE. - Requires
dwmapi.lib(Windows 10 SDK) for acrylic blur support.
LitePlayerCPP/
├── main.cpp # Entire application source (~4500 lines)
├── stb_vorbis.h # OGG Vorbis decoder (single-header library)
├── LitePlayerCPP.vcxproj # Visual Studio project file
├── LitePlayerCPP.sln # Visual Studio solution file
├── LitePlayerCPP.rc # Resource script (app icon)
├── resource.h # Resource identifiers
├── songnoteicon.ico # Application icon
├── bin/ # Build output directory
└── obj/ # Intermediate build files
Note: bin/ and obj/ are build artifacts and can be safely deleted.
- Open a folder: Click the play button to browse for a music folder
- Drag & drop: Drop audio files or folders directly onto the window
- Search: Type in the search box at the top of the playlist to filter tracks
- Clear search: Click the (X) button that appears in the search box
- Equalizer: Click the EQ button to open the 10-band equalizer window
- Compact mode: Click the widget button to toggle to the compact player
- Keyboard shortcuts: Space (play/pause), media keys supported via SMTC
- Global hotkeys: FN + Play/Pause, FN + Next, FN + Previous, FN + Stop (works even when app is not focused)
- Quick Settings: The player appears in the Windows Quick Settings media panel when playing
| Button | Function |
|---|---|
| ▶ / ⏸ | Play / Pause |
| ⏹ | Stop |
| ⏮ | Previous track |
| ⏯ | Next track |
| 🔀 | Repeat: Off / One / All |
| ⚙️ | Settings |
| 📍 | Locate current track in playlist |
| 🔊 | Volume (click to mute) |
- OGG/Vorbis decoding via stb_vorbis.h by Sean Barrett
- Icon from SongNoteIcon
- Acrylic blur via Windows DWM
SetWindowCompositionAttribute
MIT