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Cmus – A Small Terminal Music Player

180 points| senorgusto | 10 years ago |cmus.github.io | reply

66 comments

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[+] flyingmutant|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] simgidacav|10 years ago|reply
Not a real question, but a sincere Thank You for the efforts. I believe maintainers should be praised more.
[+] icesoldier|10 years ago|reply
I've been using cmus for a few months now. After trying countless music players on Linux and feeling frustrated that none of them ever felt right, cmus was the first one I thought I could get used to. In fact, I think it's the first project where I'd rather contribute new things than try to find a new project where more things feel right. So if I ever find the effort, I'll see about digging through the code and adding a couple things.
[+] zx2c4|10 years ago|reply
This is really extremely nice. Some questions:

I noticed that after adding a folder to the library, it simply adds all the filepaths in that folder to lib.pl. It doesn't cache any of the metadata. This means that it has to rescan everytime. I'm wondering what thoughts went into that design decision. On the one hand, it's very easy to manage, since it's just a list of files. On the other hand, for large collections, startup time can be considerable. I have 109GiB of music, but with a top of the line SSD, it only took ten or fifteen seconds to scan the whole thing, which isn't bad.

On a similar note, it appears that because it adds all the files to the lib.pl file, and not the top level directory I added, it doesn't have any support for noticing when new files are added to my ~/music folder. This means I have to re-add ~/music when I add files to it. I guess that's not too bad. And I assume it won't add duplicates or anything if I re-add the root level directory. But what about when I remove items? Will it be smart enough to detect that they're not there? (An algorithm like: "I just traversed a directory for which there is an existing file entry in lib.pl, but during this traversal I didn't see it. I should therefore remove it.")

[+] askedrelic|10 years ago|reply
Thanks for restarting development and having good releases, with easy to read changelogs! Cmus has been very useful to me.
[+] tingol|10 years ago|reply
I love cmus! Please continue the good work. Are there any changes lined up for the future we should be excited about?
[+] RexRollman|10 years ago|reply
No questions from me; just appreciation for the work you are doing. Thank you.
[+] oneeyedpigeon|10 years ago|reply
How do I select a specific output plugin? When I try to run cmus on OSX I get an error:

Error: selecting output plugin '': no such plugin

'cmus --plugins' lists a single plugin: ao.

[+] anon4|10 years ago|reply
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.

[+] chippy|10 years ago|reply
It's kind of relevant here, but VLC can also run inside a terminal.

  vlc -I ncurses
[+] giancarlostoro|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] JupiterMoon|10 years ago|reply
Cool! How heavy is this on ram and cpu?
[+] d99kris|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] laumars|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] binaryapparatus|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jfig|10 years ago|reply
I use CMUS under byobu.
[+] bpchaps|10 years ago|reply
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 ;).

[+] draven|10 years ago|reply
I use moc ( http://moc.daper.net/ ) but seeing the example command on the cmus homepage (:seek +1m) makes me want to test it.
[+] simgidacav|10 years ago|reply
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!

[+] captn3m0|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
It looks like cmus can use streams. Have you tried GMusicProxy 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.
[+] secure|10 years ago|reply
Same here. But when it comes to playing music stored locally, I’ve been using cmus for many years without trouble.
[+] tdicola|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] stuaxo|10 years ago|reply
Very nice, does it have a music visualiser ?

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

[+] djent|10 years ago|reply
I also recommend mpd + ncmpcpp.
[+] kinleyd|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] sotojuan|10 years ago|reply
cmus is great! Loads fast, low resource usage, and well, just works without any configuration unless you want custom settings and colors.
[+] crimsonalucard|10 years ago|reply
cool. Unfortunately, I get all my music from spotify now. No more mp3s.
[+] wwweston|10 years ago|reply
If the economic incentives spotify offers are any indication, you may be correct in more ways than one.

(Remember, kids, you're sending a clear signal about what's valuable with your purchases. And if you're using spotify, it isn't the artists whose music you're listening to.)

[+] lucaspiller|10 years ago|reply
Same here... but I've been thinking of switching as mostly I just listen to a few playlists. Are there any tools to let you easily purchase songs on iTunes / Amazon / etc based upon a Spotify playlist?