BeTon - an audio player

Master199 · January 16, 2026, 6:54pm

Since everyone is presenting and releasing their projects recently, I have decided to do the same.

BeTon - makes noise!

Plays music
Support playlists
Reads and writes tags, with bfs attribute synchronization (currently only one way).
MusicBrainz metadata query

The project is a little bit overdue. The first ideas date back to 2004–2005. Back then, I had fallen head over heels for iTunes and I wanted a similar media player for BeOS/Zeta. Since everything at that time had “Be” in its name and a audio player produces sound/tones (“Ton” in German), the name BeTon (the German word for concrete) made perfect sense to me.

Since I’m not a great artist, I used the icons from zuMi for the buttons, and the app icon is currently just a placeholder. Maybe someone who is better at this than I am, will take pity on me and help me out!

The software probably still has quite a few bugs, so it’s too early for a haikuports release. Please try it out and let me know what doesn’t work or could be improved.

bitigchi · January 16, 2026, 8:52pm

The UI is so beautiful!

ilfelice · January 16, 2026, 9:06pm

This is awesome!

Akakor · January 16, 2026, 10:08pm

Maybe @zuMi can create other, better suitable icons for your app?

BlueSky · January 16, 2026, 10:32pm

Very cool. I always thought an iTunes-like music app was missing in Haiku.

Compiled it on my nightly VM and tested it with a few albums I copied over. So far no problems, seems to work pretty good.

It doesn’t compile on beta5, due to changes in BUrl. It really is time for beta6. The newly released apps not running on beta5 are slowly piling up.

EDIT: There’s a small error in the installation instructions for the requirements. The devel package for the musicbrainz library is called musicbrainz_devel instead of libmusicbrainz_devel. I’ve already created a PR to change it.

Master199 · January 16, 2026, 11:36pm

Thanks, i merged the PR.

I know, and as soon as I have more time, I will also update my ColumnView to the latest implementation, so everything should be aligned with beta6. But at first i have to fix the warnings in the 32bit build ^^

Begasus · January 17, 2026, 6:36am

Not sure if it’s correct, but the next managed to build this on R1B5:

diff --git a/MusicBrainzClient.cpp b/MusicBrainzClient.cpp
index bc58d80..eb87f07 100644
--- a/MusicBrainzClient.cpp
+++ b/MusicBrainzClient.cpp
@@ -467,7 +467,11 @@ int MusicBrainzClient::_FetchUrl(const BString &urlStr,
     fLastCall = system_time();
 
     BMallocIO sink;
-    BUrl url(urlStr.String(), true);
+#if B_HAIKU_VERSION <= B_HAIKU_VERSION_1_BETA_5
+    BUrl url(urlStr.String());
+#else
+    BUrl burl(url, true);
+#endif
     std::unique_ptr<BUrlRequest> req(
         BUrlProtocolRoster::MakeRequest(url, &sink));
     if (!req) {

Runs fine! Great work

Master199 · January 17, 2026, 7:25am

Thanks, Begasus, I thought there would be more differences by now. In that case, we’ll change it. That makes things easier for now.

And maybe I should lighten the search field a bit; it’s a little hard to see on pure black. I usually use the default colors and only play around with the color of the seekbar ^^".

Begasus · January 17, 2026, 7:27am

Yeah, before I had some music in there I switched to default colors too to have a clear view.

Some option like highlighting the current playing track would be nice?

EDIT: maybe would be nice when ready to add this to haikuports?

Master199 · January 17, 2026, 2:43pm

You wrote the recipe already?

I’ve fixed the 32bit warnings, merged your PR (i had to change it a bit), changed the color of the searchbar in Darkmode and made the playing song bold.

No one else seems to found anything problematic, then i guess, V1.0.0 is now released.

I just made it an release on Github.

Begasus · January 17, 2026, 3:29pm

Great! Let me check again, after your 32bit fixes I did a rebuild~~, the UI didn’t show the icons though~~?

The icons were my bad, fixed by now

Doesn’t switch (display) the next song playing in the list

Maybe I should create an issue upstream for this instead of responding here?

EDIT: all good now, thanks for the fixes @Master199 !

Begasus · January 17, 2026, 5:13pm

The actual used cmd’s are “dot” and “doxygen”, so this maybe would be better (used in my local recipe)?

pkgman install cmd:dot cmd:doxygen

Arghh, should read closer, the ones mentioned here are to build the documentation. My bad

BlueSky · January 17, 2026, 5:19pm

Don’t worry, all good. For a moment I thought “WTF is he talking about”
Happens to the best of us.

PurpleStudio · January 17, 2026, 11:59pm

Playing music from BeTon as I type this message!! Awesome player! Well done.

phschafft · January 19, 2026, 1:02pm

Very nice, thanks for your work!

May I be so keen as to ask about the status of it’s audio stream support?

Master199 · January 19, 2026, 5:27pm

The question is rather vague. Do you want to stream (receive) something like Internet radio or from your local Network or do you want to stream (send) music to a device in your network, or are you talking about something like Spotify/Tidal/Qobuz.

But no matter which way around, the answer is always the same: there is currently no streaming in BeTon ^^

nipos · January 19, 2026, 6:57pm

I really like BeTon,finally tried it out today
Everything works as expected,fast,lightweight and native.
Great to see more native apps.

phschafft · January 19, 2026, 8:21pm

I intentionally kept the question a bit more open. Given my background my focus would be a little bit stronger on listening to radio stations, but all of that surely is interesting and/or valid.

us3r1d · January 19, 2026, 8:31pm

Is there a haikuports recipe for this in the pipeline?

(I’m trying to limit myself to only installing from HaikuDepot on this laptop.

nipos · January 19, 2026, 8:33pm

It’s already available in HaikuDepot.
I installed it from there.