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Some people like myself do not thrive on Library-type players and prefer players like xmms audacious or deadbeef and would rather even play their current discs/music files straight from the command-line; call it the Zen school of music-playing.

Go to your music files in the terminal

• cd Music

  I find it is even easier to have a terminal in the folder itself for this I use nautilus-terminal or gnome-open-terminal which you can install like this

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flozz/flozz

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nautilus-terminal

NOTE : After Nautilus Terminal installation you have to restart nautilus using the following command from your terminal :

nautilus -q && nautilus & exit

and then you can control it (hide/reappear) with F4 it looks like this.

For gnome-open-terminal it is in synaptic so simply

sudo apt-get-install gnome-open-terminal 

and once install go to your Music folder right-click and pick Open in Terminal

Command Line Players

I propose 5 routes here SoX which has many functions; NVLC which is part of the VLC package and Mplayer which can be used from the command line too ; also moc which is also very good and has easy navigation tools; and finally ffplay which can also be used

1. First SoX is really marvelous usually described as the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs it is perfect for our purpose here say you have a bunch of flacs it will play them which a simple command

play * flac

but with Sox you can add filters thus

play * flac bass +4 gain +2 reverb

will add quite a bit of bass reverb and added volume for all options run

man SoX

it accommodates a lot of formats

To have all extras

sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all

AUDIO FILE FORMATS: 8svx aif aifc aiff aiffc al amb amr-nb amr-wb anb au avi avr awb cdda cdr cvs cvsd cvu dat dvms f32 f4 f64 f8 ffmpeg flac fssd gsm gsrt hcom htk ima ircam la lpc lpc10 lu m4a m4b maud mp2 mp3 mp4 mpg nist ogg prc raw s1 s16 s2 s24 s3 s32 s4 s8 sb sds sf sl smp snd sndfile sndr sndt sou sox sph sw txw u1 u16 u2 u24 u3 u32 u4 u8 ub ul uw vms voc vorbis vox wav wavpcm wmv wv wve xa
PLAYLIST FORMATS: m3u pls

CTRL+C gets you to the next track if you hit CTRL+c and hit c twice it stops play

2. NVLC is simply superb as a command line player and it looks quite

nice.

• You run it this way

nvlc */./*

• to enter every folder and play every file in turn. If you are in a single folder simply enter

nvlc *

• or

nvlc *.flac  or whichever extension you are playing

and it can be used almost as well as the GUI version left and right arrows will move along your file at great speed

• keys "a" and "z" control up and down volume space bar to stop and start and info on your track with i

[Display]                                                                     
     h,H         Show/Hide help box                                           
     i           Show/Hide info box                                           
     m           Show/Hide metadata box                                       
     L           Show/Hide messages box                                       
     P           Show/Hide playlist box                                       
     B           Show/Hide filebrowser                                        
     x           Show/Hide objects box                                        
     S           Show/Hide statistics box                                     
     Esc         Close Add/Search entry

As regards formats NVLC can handle pretty everything that is around

3. Now neither SoX nor Nvlc can handle shorten which is a format that i favour and this is where Mplayer came in handy; and of course it can used for all formats handled by Mplayer and that is like NVLC a lot of formats

• even easier here go into the folder and then enter

mplayer *

• or add your extension if you only want one specific extension played ie

mplayer *.wv

if you want to enter all the music subfolders in your Music folder and play all the music files with mplayer you can use this little code As is or as a script

for i in */
do
  cd "$i"
mplayer *
  cd ..
done

or even more simply

mplayer */./*

• will do the same

4. There is yet again another route, using moc

sudo apt-get install moc moc-ffmpeg-plugin

It is very easy to use and all options can be seen by hitting h key

you start it thus:

mocp  nameofyourfileorfolderorradiostation

More tips on using moc in the DiscussionSection

5. Also using ffplay one can design a very quick commandline player

for i in */
 do
 cd "$i"
 for f in nocaseglob nullglob *.{flac,ape,wv,m4a,aac,mp4,mp3,shn} ; do ffplay -nodisp -autoexit "$f"; done
 cd ..
 done

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Other Tips

TO PLAY A CUEFILE

•  nvlc name.cue 

TO NAVIGATE ON NVLC AND MPLAYER

• Use top-bottom-left-right arrows

TO SET NVLC TO BE TWO-TONE ON THE PAGE USE nvlc --nocolor

EASY WAY TO HAVE HOTKEYS TO PAUSE/PLAY AND GO TO NEXT TRACK

• can be set in vlc global preferences and will work with nvlc too
  • ===================================================================

  • TO SIMPLIFY EVERYTHING SO PLAYLIST CAN BE TRIGGERED BY ONE WORD IN TERMINAL

This is taking the whole process further so that you can activate a playlist from the Terminal with one word

STEP 1 create a playlist in your music folder and name it Terminal.m3u

STEP 2 rightclick on folders and files you want to place in it then paste into Terminal.m3u and save

STEP 3 now we create an alias this way:

in terminal write

alias go='cd Music && nvlc --nocolor Terminal.m3u'

of course the word "go" is your choice and you can restrict the type of files you play by adding

alias go='cd Music && nvlc *flac *shn *cue Terminal.m3u'

and whatever else you want --nocolor is optional

and

gedit  ~/.bashrc

and enter full line again ( alias go='cd Music && nvlc --nocolor Terminal.m3u' ) at the bottom and save

now to make this stick

. ~/.bashrc

from now on you can start the whole thing with the simple word

go

• FROM NOW all you need is to modify your playlist when you have items you want added/taken away

• =====================================================

  • '''Discussion Page'''

CategoryCommandLine