March 23, 2026
Whips the llama’s TTY, stirs the hive
A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp
Retro vibes wow fans, but ‘phone‑home’ panic and an AI-ish demo song stir the pot
TLDR: A new terminal music app inspired by Winamp streams everything from local files to YouTube and radio, and fans love its retro visualizers. The comments are split between praise for easy streaming and worry over a reported outbound connection and a demo track that sounds awkwardly AI-made.
Winamp nostalgia just crash‑landed in your terminal with cliamp — a throwback music player that runs in a text window, pumps out trippy visualizers, and even streams YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, podcasts, and more. There’s a built‑in lo‑fi radio, a parametric equalizer (fancy bass/treble control), playlists, and a tagline winking at the old meme: it “whips the llama’s TTY.”
Fans are cheering. One user says they’re piping their favorite coding playlists straight from YouTube without even opening the site, and another is smashing the install button: “Just installed this, loving it!” The retro crowd is especially hyped about the console visualizers, calling them “wicked cool” and begging for a standalone version to vibe with any audio.
But the party hit a sour note. A nostalgic old‑schooler, fresh off memories of mp3blaster days, claims that playing a local MP3 triggered an outbound internet connection. Cue the drama: privacy purists vs. convenience streamers. The thread lit up with “Is this telemetry?” whispers and “It’s 2026, everything streams” shrugs. And then there’s the other grenade: the demo track — one commenter roasted it as “iconically AI… not great.”
So yes, it’s retro. But it’s also very now: a tightrope between terminal‑core nostalgia and the messy modern web — with the comments section doing the real headbanging.
Key Points
- •Cliamp is a terminal-based music player inspired by Winamp with visualizers, parametric EQ, and playlist management.
- •It plays local files, streams, podcasts, and supports YouTube, SoundCloud, Bilibili, Spotify, Xiaoyuzhou, and Navidrome.
- •Built with Bubbletea, Lip Gloss, Beep, and go-librespot; written in Go and buildable via go build.
- •A radio channel is provided, users can add stations via radios.toml, and host their own using cliamp-server.
- •Installation options include a GitHub script, Homebrew tap, Arch Linux AUR (yay), GitHub Releases, and building from source.