Music from your Terminal

What people use in 2018? No, seriously what is popular these days? What apps are you using for listening music? I am on old bear in a town, and I remember apps for listening music were changing fast back then, faster than the chat applications. There were always new players which were hotter, and back then I was using the following the trends.

But now, I don’t care. It’s not that I don’t care about music, I do and a lot. I still need to have my flacs around and I need good music in a good quality. It’s just that now I don’t care about the players anymore, because looks like I found the best one. There is nothing can beat command line, it was here, and it’s going to be here, hopefully till the end of my life.

I was never fan of categorizing music by artists and styles and so on. This trend among players became popular early on. And back then players were making a lot of mistakes in categorizing. I am the responsible one, so I just like to categorize the musics myself by the directories on my computer. And then play & mix them the way I want. That’s also why I got disappointed by the modern apps.

So what is the app which makes my life beautiful every day. It is actually good old VLC! I’ve discovered that it has terminal interface few years ago and it just sticked. There is nothing wrong with it. It’s simple, it works, it can play any types of music. It’s just perfect. And in combination with ranger it becomes even more handy. Just look:

VLC + ranger

In order to run it on your Mac you would need to install VLC. You can do it via brew:

brew cask install vlc

And to open the player in command line mode you would need to run:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses --no-color file.mp3

Flag --no-color makes interface less funky. There are many other useful flags. And you can also play whole directories these way.

Apart from that you can always create a shorthand for this command and define keybindings for your shell or ranger to run it.

To control the player most of the time you would want to know these keys:

• ↑, ↓ — navigation between tracks
• space — pause/play
• enter — play track under cursor
• q — quit
• h — the list of hotkeys.

Here is the whole list of hotkeys of VLC:

[Display]
h,H         Show/Hide help box
i           Show/Hide info box
L           Show/Hide messages box
P           Show/Hide playlist box
B           Show/Hide filebrowser

[Global]
q, Q        Quit
s           Stop
<space>     Pause/Play
f           Toggle Fullscreen
n, p        Next/Previous playlist item
[, ]        Next/Previous title
<, >        Next/Previous chapter
<right>     Seek +1%
<left>      Seek -1%
a           Volume Up
z           Volume Down

[Playlist]
r           Random
l           Loop Playlist
R           Repeat item
o           Order Playlist by title
O           Reverse order Playlist by title
/           Look for an item
A           Add an entry
D, <del>    Delete an entry 
<backspace> Delete an entry

[Filebrowser]
<enter>     Add the selected file to the playlist
<space>     Add the selected directory to the playlist
.           Show/Hide hidden files

[Boxes]
<up>,<down>     Navigate through the box line by line
<pgup>,<pgdown> Navigate through the box page by page

[Player]
<up>,<down>     Seek +/-5%

[Miscellaneous]
Ctrl-l          Refresh the screen

I wish you some joyful coding session and some good tunes in your ears. See you next time!█