On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 01:12:15PM +0200, Linas wrote:

If your main problem is to create playlists for a recursive music tree, I guess that this would work with pretty much all players: find /path/to/music > music-list.m3u $PLAYER music-list.m3u One shortcoming of this way is that you might need a expert shell script to update the lists containing the file, plus that filename handling needs some work with shell scripts.

Opon the original issue, I think any music player with databases would suit the original writers need. For example, exaile. As for MOC, I recommend cmus over MOC because it got more decoder over different types files. Overall, if you don't care any of the above, mpd with any suitable player (I use ncmpcpp) is a must-try combination. ps: xmms2 has similar configuration to mpd, but mpd is definitely more popular. -- 李彥學 (Ian-Xue Li) http://b4283.ath.cx A student.

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:10:22 +0800 schrieb Ian-Xue Li <da.mi.spirit@gmail.com>:

As for MOC, I recommend cmus over MOC because it got more decoder over different types files.

Well, just tried cmus. It's so complicated an unintuitive. If I need to first finish my degree to be able to use a program then there's something wrong with it. If I add a directory to the playlist, there are no tracks listed in the playlist, only the directory, and the tracks are played in random order, there's no progress bar, etc. And to do simple things, you first need to enter complicated vi like commands. I hate vi, btw. And my impression is that the sound quality of MOC is still a bit better. I doubt that one need the other decoders. At least I haven't missed a decoder in MOC. Heiko

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:10:22 +0800 schrieb Ian-Xue Li <da.mi.spirit@gmail.com>:

...

As for MOC, I recommend cmus over MOC because it got more decoder over different types files.

Well, just tried cmus. It's so complicated an unintuitive. If I need to first finish my degree to be able to use a program then there's something wrong with it. If I add a directory to the playlist, there are no tracks listed in the playlist, only the directory, and the tracks are played in random order, there's no progress bar, etc. And to do simple things, you first need to enter complicated vi like commands. I hate vi, btw. And my impression is that the sound quality of MOC is still a bit better.

I doubt that one need the other decoders. At least I haven't missed a decoder in MOC.

Heh cmus is probably my preferred player now so I ought to defend it. Too complicated, seriously ? The only command I ever need is the initial one to add my music directory : # add files, short for ':add ~/music' :a ~/music After that, all you need is 3 keys : space to expand an artist and view the albums, enter to play what you want, tab to switch between album view and track view if you want a particular track. By the way, in the main/default mode, you don't see directory, you see artist/albums from tags. There are 7 views in cmus. Press keys 1-7 to change active view. Library view (1) And these 5 shortcuts can be useful too : x player-play c player-pause v player-stop C toggle continue s toggle shuffle You cannot pretend you want keyboard controls, and not open the man page to learn the few keys you need :)

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:03:03 +0200 schrieb ludovic coues <couesl@gmail.com>:

people who doesn't like at all vi(m) will not like this kind of shortcut too I suppose.

You're wrong. Shortcuts are much different from those vi commands. For many simple editing tasks you need such complicated :commands in vi. In other editors you can do everything more intuitive with the cursor keys and with simple shortcuts. Heiko

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:54:48 +0200 schrieb Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier@gmail.com>:

...

Heh cmus is probably my preferred player now so I ought to defend it.

Too complicated, seriously ? The only command I ever need is the initial one to add my music directory :               # add files, short for ':add ~/music'               :a ~/music

:add command: As I said complicated vi like commands.

I did say some people like me only need it once. I put my music only in one directory, I don't think it's so uncommon.

In MOC you have a file and directory list on the left and a play list on the right side. You just need to move the selection bar with the cursor keys and press a for add to add a file or a directory recursively to the play list. And to remove a song from the playlist you just need to press d for delete.

Toggling between the two lists is possible with tab.

Btw., I'm not a friend of those libraries. I organize my audio files on my hard disk with directories and subdirectories. One directory for the interpreter and one subdirectory for the album.

With those libraries I usually have chaos and have much more problems finding my files, because they don't work correctly and/or the tags are not filled correctly and consistently.

http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

...

After that, all you need is 3 keys : space to expand an artist and view the albums, enter to play what you want, tab to switch between album view and track view if you want a particular track.

By the way, in the main/default mode, you don't see directory, you see artist/albums from tags.        There are 7 views in cmus.  Press keys 1-7 to change active view. Library view (1)

And these 5 shortcuts can be useful too :        x              player-play        c              player-pause        v              player-stop        C              toggle continue        s              toggle shuffle

In MOC: Enter     play p         pause s         stop n         next b         back S         toggle shuffle Somehow much more intuitive, isn't it?

Maybe you should look up where z x c v b are in a qwerty layout and what they do, and it will suddenly looks more intuitive and practical. If you're not on qwerty, you can rebind them.

...

You cannot pretend you want keyboard controls, and not open the man page to learn the few keys you need :)

I read the man page. But in MOC you just press h to toggle between the player and a quick help about the shortcuts. MOC has a man page, too, but not for the shortcuts. It's more for infos about configuration or using it with lirc.

Settings view (7) Lists keybindings, unbound commands and options. Remove bindings with D or del, change bindings and variables with enter and toggle variables with space.

And MOC has a progress bar, shows the file format, the bitrate and some other infos.

I have no need for a progress bar, this is enough for me, both more informative and shorter : 00:07 / 03:14 I don't know if it can display file format and bitrate, I don't care much and I have other ways to find this information the rare times I need it.

I don't know if cmus has them, but MOC has themes.

It has themes too. I have nothing against MOC, I like it too, just wanted to clarify a few things about cmus in case some people want to give it a try. No big deal, really.

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:10:05 -0400 schrieb Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com>:

On Tue 30 Mar 2010 19:26 +0200, Heiko Baums wrote:

...

schrieb Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier@gmail.com>:

...

Heh cmus is probably my preferred player now so I ought to defend it.

Too complicated, seriously ? The only command I ever need is the initial one to add my music directory : # add files, short for ':add ~/music' :a ~/music

:add command: As I said complicated vi like commands.

I don't know what planet you come from, but that seems pretty simple and straightforward to my inferior human brain.

This single command may be not that hard to remember. But this is not the only command, and just selecting a file with the cursor keys and pressing the shortcut 'a' is much easier and more intuitive than first enter a command ':add' and then enter the complete path manually. The file name completion in cmus doesn't work correctly, btw. And it's not only these commands, but also these shortcuts. From Xavier:

Maybe you should look up where z x c v b are in a qwerty layout and what they do, and it will suddenly looks more intuitive and practical. If you're not on qwerty, you can rebind them.

This is also not intuitive, because this rebinding works only on qwerty, but not on qwertz keyboards. And this way I have to remember which block of keys are for controlling (zxcvb,xcvbn, asdfg or whatever), and in which order the controls are bound to this block of keys (is it play, stop, next, back, shuffle or stop, back, play, next, shuffle or whatever). 'Enter' for play, 's' for stop, 'p' pause, etc. works with every keyboard with latin characters and you just need to know, what you want to do, and don't need to combine it with some other theories or so called mnemonics. So it's more intuitive. It's not, that one can't remember the other shortcuts, but the question here is, what's easier to remember and to use and what's more intuitive. And I prefer MOC's controls a lot. And pressing the shortcut 'Q' as in MOC is easier, faster and more common as entering the command ':quit' to quit the program. As I said, I don't like - in fact I hate - vi, because it's anything but intuitive and user-friendly. Nevertheless this is not the bugtracker for cmus upstream, and everyone should use, what he wants. Heiko

Am Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:46:10 -0400 schrieb David Rosenstrauch <darose@darose.net>:

I still use audacious. It's definitely able to be highly keyboard drive. Not sure about the "add music dir recursively" functionality though.

This works in audacious, too. Just select a directory and click "Add". Audacious has a nice XMMS like interface. But it has a notable poorer sound quality compared to MOC. It's notable at least with a 24/96 audio card and a good amp, speakers or headphones, when listening to FLAC files. Heiko

It would appear that on Mar 30, Heiko Baums did say:

I don't know if it meets your requirements regarding the playlist, but the best audio player I know is MOC (http://moc.daper.net). It has the best sound quality of every player I know and is controlled by keyboard.

You can set a "global" music directory in its config file and by pressing 'a' it appends the selected file or recursively every music file in the selected directory and its subdirectories to the playlist.

Well I suppose if it's easy to add music files recursively to the playlist. AND if it's just as easy to wipe the old contents, it might work for me.

Pressing 'h' brings the help screen.

That's a nice touch... It would appear that on Mar 30, ludovic coues did say:

have you try mpd ? mpc allow you to lod every file from the mpd's music directory with a single commnd like `mpc findadd Title ""`

No I haven't. But to be honest, While I want keyboard control, I don't really want to deal with remembering a command syntax when I just want to get my music going so I can work to it... It would appear that on Mar 30, Xavier Chantry did say:

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook <jtwdyp@ttlc.net> wrote:

...

Could somebody recommend another media player I could try that will let me create temporary music lists on the fly by typing the path to a parent dir containing multiple music directories???

I don't know any music player that does not allow that.

The Kaffeine from kde4... <grin>

...

One that understands keyboard commands for it's functions???

And same here.

It's probably true that most do have some shortcuts, But they're not always obvious. I must confess to being partial to a keyboard accessible pop-up menu like Kaffeine uses where <alt>+F opens the file menu. And <alt>+P lets me at the player commands etc... That way I don't have to memorize the assigned keybindings...

Anyway I would suggest you to keep trying audio players until you find one that suits your need.

Yeah I guess your right. Of course when one doesn't know the names of very many of them, it can be hard to know what to try...

For example here is a list of light one : http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lightweight_Applications#Audio_Players

I might have known Arch would have a wiki for this... <sheepish grin>

The console/curses one are made exclusively for keyboard control.

That's good to know... It would appear that on Mar 30, Ian-Xue Li did say:

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 01:12:15PM +0200, Linas wrote:

...

If your main problem is to create playlists for a recursive music tree, I guess that this would work with pretty much all players: find /path/to/music > music-list.m3u $PLAYER music-list.m3u One shortcoming of this way is that you might need a expert shell script to update the lists containing the file, plus that filename handling needs some work with shell scripts.

Actually though *_IF_* the $PLAYER doesn't choke on the lines representing each directory itself being included with the list of the music files within it, so that I don't have to edit the resulting .m3u file. Then it looks like updating would be handled by simply letting the command overwrite the old .m3u with the new contents... So I guess it wouldn't require that fancy a shell script. Probably even I could write one...

Opon the original issue, I think any music player with databases would suit the original writers need. For example, exaile.

I'm more interested in the ability to quickly generate a "these are there now" playlist than in trying to keep an existing database up to date...

As for MOC, I recommend cmus over MOC because it got more decoder over different types files.

That might be useful. It would appear that on Mar 30, Xavier Chantry did say:

Heh cmus is probably my preferred player now so I ought to defend it.

Too complicated, seriously ? The only command I ever need is the initial one to add my music directory : # add files, short for ':add ~/music' :a ~/music

After that, all you need is 3 keys : space to expand an artist and view the albums, enter to play what you want, tab to switch between album view and track view if you want a particular track.

99% of the time what I want is to just play the whole list in random order with an easy hot key to skip any I decide, upon hearing, that I'm not in the mood for.

By the way, in the main/default mode, you don't see directory, you see artist/albums from tags.

That would bug me. "tags smags" IF I'm looking at album/artist info what I want to see is the durned directory names I filed the music under... I could care less what the original album names were. Everything I want to know IS in the pathnames...

And these 5 shortcuts can be useful too : x player-play c player-pause v player-stop C toggle continue s toggle shuffle

You cannot pretend you want keyboard controls, and not open the man page to learn the few keys you need :)

True enough, assuming the man page is installed, and is written in such a way as to make it easy to quickly refresh ones memory of the "useful" shortcuts. But I gotta say, Those shortcuts would require rereading the man page most every time I wanted to use them. Unless there are on screen clues to remind me. (That's why I like pop-up menu controls.) It would appear that on Mar 30, Heiko Baums did say:

In MOC: Enter play p pause s stop n next b back S toggle shuffle Somehow much more intuitive, isn't it?

Those, I might be able to remember... <grin> <MUCH quoting from multiple replies snipped> I'm sorry, I didn't mean to start a debate over which music program is better. I guess some people have strongly entrenched preferences. I wonder if that infamous long running vi/emacs holy war started as innocently as a request for suggestions for a good editor... Oh no, tell me I didn't just mention both editor names in the same thread... Whoopsie! <snicker> Seriously though, I thank you, one and all, for the suggestions. -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:05:30AM -0300, Guilherme M. Nogueira wrote:

That is exactly what I do, with a collection of about 10.000 songs. I use MPD and ncmpcpp frontend, which is great. with ncmpcpp you just go with TAB to change from playlist to browser and vice-versa and press SPACE to add a directory and all its subdirs to the playlist. So, if you have a top directory where all your mp3s are stored (like I do), you would just go to browser and press SPACE on this top dir, and you have the playlist with all your songs.

I use mpd, and I find most of the frontends useless. You can use mpc search or grep to find the music you want and pipe it to mpc add. So mpc listall | mpc add adds every song in your music directory to the current playlist, or use search/find to filter through what you want.

Press 'z' to turn random on and off. User up and down arrow keys or pgup pgdown to navigate the playlist, and ENTER to play a song.

If you need hotkeys, just use mpc commands. mpc next mpc toggle etc...

I bound alt+v to mpc prev, alt+b to mpc next and alt+g to mpc toggle and alt+p to "mpc crop; mpc load $(basename $(ls ~.mpd/playlists/ | dmenu) .m3u); mpc play" in my wm. Couldn't be simpler, all I want from my music player is to stay out of my way, and that couldn't be more true for mpd.

-- Guilherme M. Nogueira "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

-- Helgi Kristvin Sigurbjarnarson <helgikrs (at) gmail (dot) com>