Minimalistic terminal music player that can play all my files randomly

Question

I'm looking for a terminal music player. mpg321/mpg123 is quite what I need, but it can't play all my music directory (which contains child directories). cmus seems to be a bit of an overkill, as there are a lot of features I never use.

I just need a program, that I can give it my music directory and perhaps a --random flag, then it will play everything with random orders. Can someone point out what options I have?

Answer 1

You can easily wrap up a script using find and rl (package randomize-lines on debian).

Something along the lines of:

find "$1" -type f -name *.mp3 | rl | while read FILE; do mpg123 "$FILE"; done

Answer 2

I use gst123 as a command line player. Point it at the parent directory and it will shuffle through it and the child directories with the -z flag. I run it like this.

 gst123 -z ~/Music

Answer 3

You might try MPD it consists of a server backend and a separate frontend (which may but needn't run on the same machine). There are several great command line clients for it (see http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients)

Answer 4

There is moc - Music on console. It's simpler than mpd, but ships with embedded ncurses frontend. You can use ncurses TUI with mocp or talk to the server directly.

Of course it can't do all the nifty stuff mpd can do, like network streaming, different outputs simultaneosly, etc. But as a simple console player on local machine it's pretty usefull. It works without initial configuration, in contrast to mpd. The server starts automatically when mocp is called w/o parameters, or can be started manually.

start the server

mocp -S

tell the server to append (-a) a music folder to the playlist and to switch shuffle on (-o shuffle) and to start playing (-p)

mocp -o shuffle -p -a ~/mymusicfolder

I've 9.2 GB flac files and it only need 6 sec to load it from sata 1 hdd. from my sata 2 ssd it's instant. My output is alsa. (Didn't had to configure)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Moc

Answer 5

I've spent some time fiddling with diverse minimalistic music players and today find myself especially partial to the relatively recent xmms21, a descendant (somewhat) of the venerable xmms music player.

It is a robust client-server application, designed to run full-featured from the command line or from multiple graphical clients, play practically any music encoding available, manage music collections while taking up as little processor time as possible.

Answer 6

I just use mplayer. I generated a list of files from my music folders and mplayer can take that file as a playlist and play it in random order.