
Cmus – A Small Terminal Music Player - senorgusto
https://cmus.github.io
======
flyingmutant
Oh wow, did not expect this here! I am the current maintainer (not the
original author) of cmus, and can answer some questions, if they'll come up.

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anon4
One thing I would love to see is a folder-based music view like you have
artist/album views.

I don't tag my songs, I just organise them in folders about three levels deep.
What I'd like to see is a folder tree of my music folder on the left and all
the files in that folder, plus all subfolders recursively, on the right. The
only player I remember getting this right was amarok (now clementine). I've
never once in my life ever wanted my songs listed by album or artist. I have
my file manager to organise my files and they're already organised. It's
really silly to ask me to organise them again in a different way that doesn't
really fit my organisational style.

~~~
Shish2k
Ditto - automatic organisation by metadata might be nice if metadata wasn't
universally inconsistent and incomplete. I tried manually fixing my whole
library and it was nice for a couple of weeks, but there's so much ongoing
maintainence overhead that OS-level folders are the only thing I bother with
any more :(

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anon4
The metadata doesn't even reflect the way I think about music. And what do you
do with movie OSTs, which are by ten different artists and some are songs from
other albums? It's just madness.

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aidenn0
I use beets for tagging, and it has no trouble with OSTs. It sets a different
tag for Album artist and Track artist, and cmus uses the Album artist. Most
soundtracks of the type you mention are under <Various Artists>.

I'm different from most people in that nearly all of my music collection is
complete albums, so if that's not the case, then I could see how a file/folder
layout would work better, and the artist/album view is more full-featured than
the file-browser view.

[edit] Also as far as I can tell, there's no way to filter based off of path
(only filename) which might also be a good way if you prefer directory based
organization.

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chippy
It's kind of relevant here, but VLC can also run inside a terminal.

    
    
      vlc -I ncurses

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giancarlostoro
Noticed it when installing it on openSUSE, but VLC wont install any codecs
that get installed on Windows, not sure what the legal issue is with that but
it might as well be a paperweight on my laptop as is. Maybe I'll give it a
shot as a terminal music client. On another thought, does that mean VLC
somehow displays video with ascii? hah

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d99kris
I used cmus for a while, but always wanted a user interface more similar to
winamp, so I built namp
[https://github.com/d99kris/namp](https://github.com/d99kris/namp)

~~~
laumars
Nice work there, that looks pretty good.

I do have one very minor suggestion though; you might want to change your
README.md:

    
    
        > namp is a command line MP3 player for Linux
    

Technically it's a terminal player rather than command line.

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d99kris
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I agree. Terminal, or console-based, player is a
more correct description. Will update!

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binaryapparatus
Some time ago I did complete depart from Apple apps and services, while still
using Mac. It was pain to extract all the images from Photos but music
transition to cmus was smooth. I am mostly playing di.fm stations and cmus
works well with subscription links. Sadly both cmus and mplayer on Mac rely on
Carbon components so there is big console warning for using deprecated
components and more importantly they can't be send to background. If somebody
got them playing as background process please let me know.

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flyingmutant
About «backgrounding» — please see
[https://github.com/cmus/cmus/wiki/detachable-
cmus](https://github.com/cmus/cmus/wiki/detachable-cmus) .

Carbon components warning is because cmus currently uses libao for the sound
output on OS X by default. If somebody will contribute a native OS X output
plugin, it will be gone.

~~~
binaryapparatus
Thanks. I am most probably on exit route from anything Apple or Google so most
likely next cmus will be playing on native Linux for me. Off topic but Apple
increasingly makes it easier to make such decision.

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bpchaps
I've been using cmus for the past two months and absolutely love it! Its
simplicity compared to many other ncurses-based applications is refreshing.

My only wish is that it was a bit more "vi-y". I'm sure someone has a way,
though ;).

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draven
I use moc ( [http://moc.daper.net/](http://moc.daper.net/) ) but seeing the
example command on the cmus homepage (:seek +1m) makes me want to test it.

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chanux
I used cmus before I found moc on Crunchbang. The feel of moc was just right
for me.

I wrote down how I use moc[1]. Hope someone might like it. Also I tried to
make navigation feel like vim sometime back. The keymap[2] might have a few
tips.

[1] [https://chanux.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/the-thinnest-
music-i...](https://chanux.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/the-thinnest-music-
interface/)

[2]
[https://github.com/chanux/dotfiles/blob/master/moc/keymap](https://github.com/chanux/dotfiles/blob/master/moc/keymap)

~~~
cJ0th
Yeah, thanks for sharing. I am also a moc enthusiast. Your post inspired me to
add key bindings for moc commands to my awesomewm's rc.lua.

Oh and since I have no use for the audioStop key I made it run a python script
that displays the name of the current song via dbus.

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simgidacav
My two cents: I used cmus before, but in the long term I still prefer mplayer.

I construct the playlists myself by using soft-links to the actual paths of
the songs. Real files are placed in sensibly named directories.

It's a matter of taste of course. Still I really appreciate that people write
this kind of software for the terminal!

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Have you tried mpv?

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captn3m0
cmus user here. Its the only music player on my machine, but I'm using it less
and less every day (Google Play Music)

~~~
zipperhead
It looks like cmus can use streams. Have you tried GMusicProxy
[http://gmusicproxy.net/](http://gmusicproxy.net/) ? I use it with mpd but it
should work with cmus as well. It's nice not to be able to access google play
music via a regular music player.

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protonpopsicle
I've found this issue helpful in getting cmus working on OS X El Capitan:
[https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/331](https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/331)

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tdicola
I've used cmus a bit and really like it--the simplicity is great if you have a
lot of albums. Graphical players always bog down, are slow to scroll, etc.

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stuaxo
Very nice, does it have a music visualiser ?

It would be sick if this could play videos via libcaca too..

~~~
an_ko
For visualiser, you might like
[https://github.com/karlstav/cava](https://github.com/karlstav/cava)

For libcaca, see mpv's or mplayer's "-vo caca" flag.

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djent
I also recommend mpd + ncmpcpp.

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kinleyd
mpd + ncmpcpp is my favourite too. It's made my music so easy to access, while
allowing me to organize it the way I like it - by directory.

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sotojuan
cmus is great! Loads fast, low resource usage, and well, just works without
any configuration unless you want custom settings and colors.

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crimsonalucard
cool. Unfortunately, I get all my music from spotify now. No more mp3s.

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shadeless
If you'd still like to use a terminal player you should check out mopidy:
[https://www.mopidy.com](https://www.mopidy.com)

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sroerick
I'm curious... Is mopidy like mpd in that clients that connect are only able
to edit the playlist? Or can they themselves play songs?

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provemewrong
It's not just like mpd, it _is_ mpd + a HTTP server. Ergo you need to control
it with a CLI or graphical mpd client or with a web client.

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avuton
It is absolutely not MPD, it has a partial implementation of the MPD protocol.

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meir_yanovich
Any support for windows ?

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tdicola
It sounds like cygwin can compile and run it:
[http://matthieukeller.com/2015/01/compiling-cmus-for-
cygwin....](http://matthieukeller.com/2015/01/compiling-cmus-for-cygwin.html)

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tsujamin
10/10, fav music player

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nullsie
God, I'm dyslexic....

