Cmus

cmus (C* Music Player) is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and operates exclusively through a text-only interface, built with ncurses.

The text-only design vastly reduces the resources needed to run the program, making it a strong choice for very light computers as well as systems where a graphical environment (such as the X Window System) is not available. By eliminating the use of mouse, the program performs a wide array of tasks faster than its mouse-driven counterparts, albeit after some practice with the non-mouse paradigm.

Basic Use

Owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard (excepting the operation through cmus-remote). Commands are loosely modeled after those of the vi text editor. General operation mimics being in command-mode of vi, where complex commands are issued by prepending them with a colon, (e.g. ":add /home/user/music-dir"), simpler, more common commands are bound to individual keys, such as "j/k" moving down/up, or "x" starting playback, and searches beginning with "/" as in "/the beatles" searching (case insensitive) for any tracks containing both "the" and "beatles," order irrelevant. Note that default case insensitivity and searching for each of the space-separated terms is a deviation from the Regular Expressions engine that vi uses.

Any command May Be bound to a single key, expediting complex commands' repeated use. The default configuration is fully customizable, which is a boon to non-English keyboard layouts.

A small tool called 'cmus-remote' allows manipulation of any aspect of cmus available in the interactive program from externally.

Features

  • Input Plugins
    • FLAC
    • Ogg/Vorbis
    • MP3 (libmad)
    • Wav
    • WMA (ffmpeg)
    • .mod, .s3m, ... (libmodplug)
    • .mpc, mpp, .mp+ (libmpcdec)
    • MPEG-4/AAC (libmp4v2, libfaad2)
  • Output Plugins
  • Playing
    • Artist/album/track tree view
    • List view
    • Editable playlists
    • Play queue
    • MP3, Ogg and AAC streaming (Shoutcast/Icecast)
    • Powerful playlist filters
  • Interface
    • Simple directory browser
    • Fully customizable colors
    • Tab-completion on commands
  • Misc
    • UTF-8 support
    • Execute external commands for marked files
    • Tested on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD

See also

  • Herrie
  • Music On Console
  • cplay