Streaming from the command line
Shashank Sharma won’t ever stop singing the praises of the command line, and applications like Musikcube, are the reason why.
Holidays are the time to get together with friends and family and share stories over some good food. It’s an undeniable fact that such get-togethers are even better when complimented with music – major brownie points if you’ve got a streaming system in place. But if you want geek creds, you’ve got to be able to do all that from the command line.
Musikcube is a cross-platform music player. The native streaming ability sets Musikcube apart from other popular command-line music players such as Cmus. Although it isn’t available in the software repositories of many popular desktop distributions, the BSD-licensed project provides 64-bit binaries for the more-recent releases of Fedora and Ubuntu.
Unlike most other command-line utilities, Musikcube does have quite a few dependencies, but thankfully most of these are offered in the software repositories of most distributions. After downloading the pre-packaged binaries for your distribution, you can use the native package management utility to install Musikcube, and it will inform you of any missing dependencies. The project’s wiki on GitHub has a list of distributionspecific dependencies and instructions on installing Musikcube from source.
USING THE PLAYER
The hardest part of working with Musikcube is getting its spelling right. Thankfully, the auto-complete feature on Bash means you will never encounter this difficulty. Besides, you can also create an alias to circumvent the curious spelling.
When you launch Musikcube, it drops you into the Settings view. The interface is split into three different panes. The pane at the bottom lists a number of configurable options that define the app’s behaviour. For instance, you can configure Musikcube’s server settings, change key bindings, change the output device, etc. Take your time navigating through the different configurable options. You can tie Musikcube with your Last.fm account or change to a different colour theme. If the Check For Updates On Startup option is enabled, Musikcube will display a pop-up informing you of the availability of a new release.
In the top left is the file browser. You can use it to select your music directories. To add a directory to the library, select it in the file browser and then press the Spacebar. You can add multiple directories to the library, which are displayed in the indexed paths pane at the top of the interface. To delete a directory, select it from the Indexed Paths pane and press the Backspace key.
After you’ve added directories to the library, you must switch to the Library view from the default Settings view. To do this, press ‘a’. Musikcube reads the metadata on the individual music files and can sort the collection according to genre, artist, album, etc. By default, the
Library view features a pane on the left with a list of all the artists whose songs you have in the library. When you select an artist, the associated tracks are displayed in the Tracks pane on the right. If you have more than one album for an artist in your library, the Tracks pane will identify the different albums.
You can switch between the different panes with the Tab key. To play a track, select it from the Tracks pane and press enter. You can pause/ resume playback of a track by pressing the Spacebar.
From the library view, accessed by pressing ‘a’, you can also toggle between different views. By default the Library view lets you browse your collection by different artists. You can alternatively press ‘2’, to switch to the Albums view, where the pane on the left will display all the albums in your library. Press ‘3’ if you want a view of all the different genres of the files in your library. You can also create different playlists with Musikcube and access these by pressing ‘5’. To return to the default Artists view, press ‘1’.
Like many other feature-rich command-line utilities, Musikcube has a vast number of default key bindings, but they don’t perform the same function at all times. For instance, pressing the Spacebar in the Library view will pause or resume playback, but it does nothing when you’re in the Settings view. Similarly, pressing 1-5 only works from the Library view and not the Settings view. In addition to view-specific and function-specific shortcuts, the project also has a number of default and global key bindings. As the name suggests, the global key bindings perform uniform functions, irrespective of where you are in the Musikcube interface. You must refer to the user guide on the project’s GitHub webpage for a complete list of configured key bindings (https://github.com/ clangen/musikcube/wiki/userguide).
On most Linux distributions and applications, the left Alt key on the keyboard is treated as the Meta key, and Musikcube is no exception. You can access the context menu for a selected item by pressing Alt+Enter. You can add individual tracks to a playlist by individually selecting them from your library, or you can create a playlist based on artist name or genre. From the Library view, press ‘1’ or ‘3’ to select either the Artist or the Genre view respectively. Select an artist or genre from the pane on the left. You’ll notice that all the relevant tracks are displayed in the Tracks pane. Press Alt+Enter to access the context menu, and select Add To Playlist in the pop-up. You can choose to add to an existing playlist or create a new one. You can now access all the playlists by pressing ‘5’ from the Library view.
The playback control bar appears at the bottom of the interface when you start playing a track. It has all the functions you expect from a music player, such as letting you tweak the volume, toggle shuffle on/off, queue repeat, etc. There are, of course, keyboard shortcuts to perform each of these functions too. The ‘,’ key is used to toggle shuffle on/off. You can similarly use the ‘.’ key to switch between repeat-list, repeat track, or turn off repeat.
FILTERING TRACKS
With an extensive music collection, you might not always remember the name of the artist or album, or even the complete name of the track you might be want to listen to. Should that happen, you can use Musikcube’s filter function to quickly identify the track you’re interested in. Press ‘f’ in the Library view to open the in-built search engine. There’s a search bar at the top of the interface, while the panes at the top list all of the albums, artists and genres that your music collection features.
As you start typing in the search bar, Musikcube will narrow down the matching results for each category. For instance, when we type ‘ch’ in the search bar, it displays the album Calls and Echoes, the artist Chad Crouch and the genre Psychedelic Rock. The filter function, however, can’t be used to narrow down a track you’re interest in. For this, you must switch to the Tracks Filter view by pressing ‘t’. You can now use the search bar to identify all tracks that match your criteria.
Despite being a rounded utility, Musikcube does have a few shortcomings. For one, it doesn’t support real-time or live updating of indexed paths. So if you add new tracks to an already indexed directory, an already running instance of Musikcube can’t immediately see or access these tracks. You must either close and then relaunch Musikcube, or remove the directory and add it again. Also missing is support for internet radio stations. This is a fairly common feature in modern graphical music players, and it has already been requested by other users.
If you’re looking for a robust music player to manage your collection of tracks, this nifty utility is more than up to the task. The ability to stream is icing on the cake.