CMus a Curses Based Music Player

I like console based programs because they usually have a decent interface which can be controlled only by keyboard facilitating usage in any environment including SSH sessions when no X server is available. With screen you even have some kind of window manager.

I regularly use vim, mutt and sometimes irssi and now it seems that I have found another useful console application the CMus - C* Music Player. It is a full featured music player for the console with support for various file formats, a intuitive interface including playlist handling (sorting, grouping, searching etc.), directory browser, vim-like command line syntax with tab expansion, extremely powerful playlist filters and a lot more.

I suggest you just check it out and read the documentation which is included in the source tarball, it really is a good piece of software.

Configuring CMus to use the ALSA dmix plugin

As I covered in an another blog entry the ALSA dmix plugin can be used to control access to the sound device and allow multiple applications to use it at the same time. To configure CMus to use the dmix plugin we just have to change one option in ~/.config/cmus/config.

dsp.alsa.device = "plug:dmix"

This could also be done by issuing the following command within cmus in command line mode.

:set dsp.alsa.device=plug:dmix

Marc