CMus

CMus is a terminal-based music player using the ncurses toolkit. CMus supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, Musepack, WavPack, WMA, AAC and MP4.

review

The review is not good so far, as I can't get CMus to load a playlist or save one. Only one playlist in the config directory is visible even though several exist and CMus won't load or save to any of them. And, no, this is NOT a file permissions issue.

I was really hoping this player would work well as I do like the vi editor style commands. I am much more familiar with vi commands as opposed to the Moc player's MidnightCommander style command system.

installation

sudo apt install cmus

usage

First of all, we will add several songs to the media library. CMus uses Vi-style commands, so all the commands will start with : followed by a certain command. For example, to add all the audio files inside the ~/music directory, we would use:

:add ~/music

seven different views

• 1 - Library, the default view mode, including two tabs (artists/albums and songs in currently selected album)
• 2 - Sorted Library, which provides a playlist view allowing to jump to specific tracks (this view can be customized in view mode 6
• 3 - Playlist, editable playlist
• 4 - Play Queue, which displays the track queue
• 5 - File Browser
• 6 - Filters, a list of user-defined filters for the library
• 7 - Settings, which displays key bindings and commands

control

• TAB to switch between the two tabs
• X to start playing
• V to stop playing
• C to pause playing
• - to decrease volume by 10%
• + to increase volume by 10%

colon commands

   :set softvol=true - enable software volume control
   :add /path/to/music/dir - will add all the audio files from /path/to/music/dir to the library
   :clear - will clear the playlist
   :save playlist.pls - will save the current playlist
   :load playlist.pls - will load playlist.pls
   :set status-display-program=/path/to/scrobbler - will set the script to use for Last.fm song submission

FILES

cmus reads its configuration from 3 different places.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/cmus/autosave

• This is the first file cmus loads. cmus saves its state on exit to this file so you shouldn't edit it.

/usr/share/cmus/rc

• If the autosave file didn't exist, this file is read instead.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/cmus/rc

• Static config file. This file is read immediately after the autosave file, and is never modified by cmus. You can override auto-saved settings in this file. This file is not limited to options, it can contain other commands too.

On Ubuntu/mint look in:

• ~/.config/cmus