muss

The fast and simple way to play music from the command line

Introduction

Ready to move beyond slow and complicated music collection management software?

Do you find yourself spending too much time clicking, scrolling, dragging, dropping just to hear your favorite slow-jam?

muss is a simple and very fast command line tool to play music. Its goal is to minimize time spent browsing lists of artists/songs/albums/tracks.

What kind of people would use muss? People who ...

• can often name the music they want to hear
• also want an option to browse their collection
• have easy access to a command line
• seek to minimize music player overhead (time, memory, cpu, etc)
• do not care about flashy displays of album art, lyrics, ratings
• do not want to learn yet another quirky graphical interface, even if it is only ncurses
• do not want to spend time creating lots of different playlists

Usage

muss works entirely from the command line (no mouse). It builds a playlist for the mpc client based on keywords entered at the command line; or through an interactive instant-search of your music library.

muss searches for matches in the mpd database of file names and playlist names. Then it automatically starts playing the songs. It can play internet radio streams when they are included in a playlist.

There are no configuration settings for muss beyond what is already set up with mpc and mpd. To install, simply copy the muss executable file into your search path (eg /usr/local/bin/).

Quicksearch mode examples: muss rolling stones muss roll sto muss guns roses not heaven muss playlist summer 2004 muss publicradio

Interactive mode: muss

In addition to the core commands which create a playlist, muss has basic operations for controlling playback (eg. pause, randomize, list).

Requirements

• mpc, mpd
• sed, grep
• filenames and directory names should be useful. If you have a lot of files with generic names like "track01.mp3", you will not be able to match them as individual songs. If they are in well-named folders like "/Beatles/Abbey Road/track01.mp3" then you can at least match by the artist or album. For help finding and fixing music file names, try EasyTAG and picard.
• dmenu patched to support token style multiple pattern matching (-t), and filtermode (-f) to provide multiple items in the result Note that a version of dmenu with these patches applied is available in the dmenu-db repository.

To Do

• add command to save current playlist as a permanent mpd playlist (requires mpc v.0.15.0 or newer)

Thank you

The primary inspiration for a simple command-line approach came from plait which showed the convenience of partial-text search. plait has some features not found in muss (eg. support for multiple player backends, shoutcast stream searching).

After using plait for a while, I sometimes missed the ability to scan and browse for music that I had forgotten. But I did not want to have a cumbersome graphical browser as found in graphical music management programs, so I did not pursue it. Then later I saw the excellent text browsing experience demonstrated by the very fast and simple program launcher built with dmenu included with many text-centric linux distributions.

muss is an attempt to combine the best of both modes, search and browse. The name can be thought of as an abbreviation of "music search". It is also an idiom heard in TV commercials to imply a messy hassle ("no fuss! no muss!") which is what the over-complicated music players can be. Lastly, it is also a German word that translates to English as "must", which appeals to the idea that the computer should be responding to commands from people, and not asking people to waste time with a difficult interface.

Dan Brown, 2010 project home page