Throughout my relatively short (or long, it's hard to tell) experience with gnu/linux systems I have used a variety of console music players. If I remember correctly the first one I used, years ago, was music123, then moc, mplayer...I had recently settled with nvlc because I found it very handy to start it on an ssh/tmux session to be able to control it from any corner of my network. See post on nvlc for details.
But now I have definitely and absolutely switched to cmus the single best console music player I know so far. Why?
Well, to begin with, I can still use it inside tmux or screen and use ssh to control it over the local network.
Secondly I can scrobble with it to http://libre.fm so that the songs I listen to are immediately published online.
cmus does not scrobble out of the box by itself. In order to make it scrobble I downloaded a script named last-cmus.py (linked from cmus official site) and modified it a bit. The process is pretty simple. Download the script to $HOME/.cmus, make it executable, edit username, password and url to use "http://turtle.libre.fm/". Finally, in cmus interface set status_display_program=/home/chals/.cmus/last-cmus.py
And last but not least. I can know which song I'm listening to at any time since it is echoed by conky.
Again, cmus does not directly communicate with conky. I had to download another script I found on the internet to make it work. Then I edited my .conkyrc adding this:
${color #ffcb48}Now Playing ${hr 1}
${color lightgrey}
${execi 2 /home/chals/Dropbox/bin/cmux-conky}
Notice that this time in order to make this setting more portable inside my own network, I added the script to my Dropbox folder so that I can access it from all my machines.
Awesome, huh!
