I know … we’re all supposed to use graphical music players these days. I tried … honest, but I just couldn’t find one I liked well enough. This one had a habit of crashing randomly, that one was too database driven, this one was worried too much about a good interface for streaming music, that one liked play lists too much.
What I need in an audio player is :-
- The ability not to play a wide choice of audio codecs, but at least the codecs I use for encoding audio (FLAC) plus codecs for audio that gets downloaded – MP3, and OGG.
- The ability to play audio files from the filesystem without imposing some sort of database driven interface – specifically it shouldn’t say “Hey! I’ve noticed that your media files have changes; I’ll just spend 20 minutes rebuilding the database before I’ll let you play anything”.
- To start quickly and to quickly let me pick the audio files I want to play. Spending time figuring out what I was doing last time is unnecessary.
Note the lack of any fancy graphical interface or the requirement to plugin extras such as a link to last.fm such features are fine, but for me unnecessary.
So I found moc (Wikipedia link because the official website was broken when I wrote this) … an “command-line” (actually text screen based) music player with extensive configuration options. This is not so much a review as a discovery of the configuration options …
The first thing to find out is what file moc uses for configuration. Simple: ~/.moc/config. By making changes to this, and restarting moc I was able to make gradual improvements. The ordering of the options below is in the order of my discoveries which was greatly assisted by reading the example configuration in /usr/share/doc/moc/examples/config.example.gz
First, I wanted moc to start off by automatically changing to a specific directory :-
MusicDir = /media/ibox/albums StartInMusicDir = yes
Next, turn off the use of mmap() as it is apparently slow on NFS and my music files are on an NFS server :-
UseMmap = no
The end result is a simple player that works in a terminal window.