---
title: "3dsFM"
url: "https://ankush.one/projects/2026.3dsfm/"
description: "A music player for the Nintendo 3DS. Copy MP3, Ogg, Opus and WAV files to the SD card and it plays them with cover flow, a queue and a visualizer, lid open or closed."
author: "Ankush Singh"
date: 2026-10-13
lastmod: 2026-10-13
tags: ["hardware","game-dev"]
website: "https://ankush.one/3dsFM/"
repository: "https://github.com/ankushKun/3dsFM"
links:
  - {"archived":false,"label":"Website","url":"https://ankush.one/3dsFM/"}
  - {"archived":false,"label":"GitHub","url":"https://github.com/ankushKun/3dsFM"}
---

# 3dsFM

Links:

- [Website](https://ankush.one/3dsFM/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/ankushKun/3dsFM)

**3dsFM turns a 3DS into the music player it should have shipped as.**

I had a folder of 600 downloaded songs and a New 3DS that sits next to my bed. The console's own sound app is from 2011 and acts like it, so I wrote my own. Drop files under `sdmc:/Music`, loose or in folders, and 3dsFM reads the tags, pulls out the cover art and sorts everything into songs, artists and a queue.

The bottom screen is the controller. Songs come as a cover flow you can flick through, a grid or a list; the top screen is always the player, with the art fogged behind the title. Close the lid and the music keeps going with the screens off, like an iPod with a hinge.

## Features
- MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Opus and WAV, decoded on the console with mpg123, Tremor and libopus
- Tags from ID3, Vorbis comments and WAV INFO chunks, with video-site noise like "(Official Video)" cleaned off titles
- A library index on the SD card, so 600 songs appear instantly on every launch after the first
- Cover flow with flick physics, a grid and a list, plus artists with song counts and a play queue
- Covers load for what is on screen first, so long lists stay smooth
- A visualizer, dark and HOME Menu themes, and playback with the lid closed
- A 3D HOME Menu banner with its own jingle, built from a glTF model in the repo

## Built With
- C++17 with libctru, Citro2D and Citro3D, NDSP for sound
- Host-side tests for the tag reader, scanner and queue under AddressSanitizer
- Reproducible .3dsx and .cia builds in Docker, released by GitHub Actions
- Shares its toolchain and website design with [3dsDL](https://ankush.one/projects/2026.3dsdl/)

It is a development build that I test on a New 3DS. The story of getting it to play without freezing the console is in [the blog post](https://ankush.one/blogs/nintendo-3ds-homebrew/). GPLv3.