cplay-ng 2.4.1

A curses front-end for various audio players

Description

cplay-ng is a curses front-end for various audio players written in python. It aims to provide a power-user-friendly interface with simple filelist and playlist control.

The original cplay is no longer maintained. This fork aims to maintaining the original code as well as keeping it up to date with recent developments (e.g. python3) and adding new features.

Requirements

• python
• pyalsaaudio (optional) For Alsa mixer support
• python-oss (optional) For OSS mixer support
• pulseaudio-utils, specifically the pactl command (optional) For PulseAudio mixer support
• mutagen (optional) For metadata support (IDv3 etc.)

For playback, install one or more of the following players:

• mplayer
• mpv
• gst123
• ffplay
• avplay
• sox
• vlc
• mpg321
• ogg123
• mpg123
• splay
• madplay
• mikmod
• xmp
• speex
• timidity

Installation

pip install cplay-ng

Usage

cplay-ng [ file | dir | playlist ] ...

For a full list of command line options, see cplay-ng --help. When in doubt about runtime controls, press ‘h’ for a friendly help page.

Apart from cplay-ng, this distribution also includes the program cnq-ng to remote-control a running cplay-ng.

Configuration

If you would like to change options passed to the actual players just edit the BACKENDS list in the cplay-ng script or put the BACKENDS definition in either ~/.cplayrc or /etc/cplayrc. If one of these files is available, it is executed by cplay-ng before initialization.

Macros are defined using the MACRO dictionary, where the key is a key and the value is a string of cplay-ng input. For example, the following would make ,d delete tagged (or current) files:

MACRO['d'] = '!rm "$@"\n'

Note, there is currently no version control for the rc-file!

Miscellaneous

A playlist can contain URLs, but the playlist itself will have to be local. For mpeg streaming, splay is recommended.

It is also possible to pipe a playlist to cplay-ng, as stdin will be reopened on startup unless it is attached to a tty.

The shell command gets the full path of either all tagged items or the current item as positional arguments.