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.
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.")
Cmus does cache all the metadata — in the file named, unsurprisingly, «cache». You can restart cmus, and notice that the startup will be instant (even on an HDD with 100+GiB of music).
Re-adding the ~/music should work fine. There is also an `:update-cache` command which will update the metadata for all (changed) files, and remove the missing ones.
Another thanks here. I'm between cmus and mocp at the moment due to the segfaulting bug on Debian[0] but might try to compile the latest version from source if these have been squashed upstream...
Please give the latest version a try. I am not aware of any segfaults that have not been fixed upstream. Debian packages a really ancient version of cmus for some reason.
Would be neat if you could also include streaming services like Pandora. I use Pianobar https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar for Pandora would be nice to have some streaming tie ins. A one stop music resource so to speak. A book mark system to listening to Internet radio like cmdradio https://cmdradio.codeplex.com?
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.
Moc does that. If like me you're not a music player guy you can use mplayer in slave mode, reading from a playlist created with `find | sort`. I made a script to do that and some other stuff. https://gist.github.com/afarah1/e8cbafaf1d9d8029c6ca
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 :(
I tag my music through MusicBrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/) and I generally don't have to worry about metadata anymore. I generally try to correct anything I find that's wrong. abcde + picard + ncmpcpp.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.")
Re-adding the ~/music should work fine. There is also an `:update-cache` command which will update the metadata for all (changed) files, and remove the missing ones.
[0] - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=cmus;dist=...
Error: selecting output plugin '': no such plugin
'cmus --plugins' lists a single plugin: ao.
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.
I do have one very minor suggestion though; you might want to change your README.md:
Technically it's a terminal player rather than command line.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.
My only wish is that it was a bit more "vi-y". I'm sure someone has a way, though ;).
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...
[2] https://github.com/chanux/dotfiles/blob/master/moc/keymap
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!