🎼 symphonix

Find, play, download and use public-domain classical music — entirely from your terminal. 24 legendary composers. Animated ASCII portraits. A real-time equalizer driven by the actual audio. Works on Linux, macOS, Windows — anything that runs Python.

 pip install symphonix

⚡ quickstart

sx                       # splash screen + menu of ideas
sx search chopin nocturne        # colorful results table
sx play mozart requiem           # streams instantly + animated equalizer
sx download bach brandenburg     # download to a local cache
sx quiz                          # guess-the-composer game (music plays!)
sx theme vaporwave               # repaint the whole app

Prefer not installing yet? python -m symphonix play bach air works too.

🎨 the cool part — command tour

🌎 what "public domain" is used

Audio comes from three wonderful projects:

• archive.org — 100k+ classical recordings, stable API, direct mp3/ogg/flac
• musopen.org — royalty-free recordings (their license icons still apply per track)
• imslp.org — the Petrucci Library: sheet music + community recordings

Composer facts via Wikipedia. All playback uses miniaudio (a pure pip wheel — no system libraries needed). If the wheel is missing for your platform, symphonix automatically falls back to ffplay / mpv / mpg123 if installed.

🔌 use it inside your own python code

from symphonix import search, Track

tracks = search("beethoven symphony 5", limit=3)
best: Track = tracks[0]

print(best.title, "|", best.composer, "|", best.url)
best.cache_path()       # stable local path after sx download

Also: symphonix.player.Player (play by track), symphonix.art.COMPOSERS (the portraits), symphonix.config.THEMES. The CLI is just the tip.

🖥 platforms

Requires just Python 3.9+.

🧪 development

git clone https://github.com/thisisforlearn/classical && cd classical
pip install -e .[dev]
pytest            # offline tests
pytest --live     # include home-tested network tests

🛟 licensing

symphonix is GPL-3.0-or-later (see LICENSE).

The recordings are public-domain recordings per their source, but every country's implementation differs (especially on performance rights). Each track row shows the source; --json includes the license URL when the upstream provides one. Do the polite thing and respect whatever the source icon says.

🔴 the fun part

cd classical && sx quiz — the library plays a real recording, hides the composer, and you guess. Highest score is saved on your machine forever. Beat it.