Musikcube, a cross-platform, terminal-based library, player and server | Hacker News Reader

Musikcube, a cross-platform, terminal-based library, player and server

github.com

69 pointsZaplanincan22 comments

Been using this as my music player for about 3 years now (i've switched to it from foobar2000).

It has very low memory footprint and works great. This is the app that "showed" me how great TUI apps are and i wish more TUI apps would exist as equivalent to GUI ones.

Agreed and it even responds to global player hotkeys! Love it.

I expect you'd want accurate tagging for this to work well (less of a problem these days I guess). My prime reason for sticking with foobar is the option for tree-view playlists and auto-generating playlists from compressed archives.

Reminds me a lot of the mpd (music player daemon) ecosystem. Some mpd clients look just like that:

https://www.musicpd.org/clients/

and I wonder what the advantage is vs. MDP. It was a pretty ok "product" when I ran it 10years ago on an old Pentium III notebook with 256MB of memory. I think it still would work if I booted it now.

AFAIK, musikcube is the only thing available on Windows. Have been satisfied with it in the past, but now I just use Spotify.

MPD supports Windows: https://www.musicpd.org/download.html

Lots of Windows compatible clients too. In fact quite a few clients are completely OS agnostic (ie web clients)

The "D" in MPD stands for daemon — so typically it is something where you have a "jukebox"-style computer hooked up to some sound system and multiple (network) clients that can control the playlist etc. MPD is basically a audio player with playlist managment that exposes all controls via network API.

The client could be an app on your phone, or a web-frontend served from that jukebox server etc.

We have a box like that at work, where multiple people are meant to add music, stop and queue it without having to stand up.

I tried Musikcube a week ago and it's pretty good aside from that, though once it crashed for some reason. Looks more polished than most TUI applications, though.

Nothing can replace Clementine for me. It can stop playback automatically once a song is finished playing. Imho this is the best feature since the invention of playlists and I don't know why nobody else implements this (except for I think foobar2000 but that's a Windows app).

How do you mean “stop a song playing automatically”?

I always assumed that was the default behaviour of music players and that Spotify was the outlier on continuing to play related songs after your playlist had ended (it being a “feature” of Spotify).

They probably meant a function where the playback stops after the current song.

I know this from my podcast app with a "Zzzz" Icon where you can stop playback after the current episode or after a certain time (e.g. 15 minutes).

It's an old school playlist management feature from the Amarok Era, it's for when you're thinking "this is the last song I'm listening to, but I do want to finish it". Once that song gets hit in your playlist, it'll automatically stop playback at the end of it.

And by playlist I more mean active queue. Making it sound complex but it's a very intuitive UI if you try it out.

The whole design of Amarok/Clementine is so far ahead of modern players like Spotify, just being able to browse songs off your play list while keeping your playlist visible would be nice, but stuff like "queue as next" vs "queue as last" is awesome. These days Electron UIs confuse me so much I'm not sure what I can even drag and drop.

> It's an old school playlist management feature from the Amarok Era, it's for when you're thinking "this is the last song I'm listening to, but I do want to finish it". Once that song gets hit in your playlist, it'll automatically stop playback at the end of it.

That's just the "play once" option that exists in 99% of music player's, isn't it? Supported by all default music players on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, as far as I can see.

What I mean is basically like a delayed "pause" button that triggers once the currently playing song ends. It can be set during playback and doesn't affect any other playback setting or queued songs.

The alternative is either abruptly stopping playback or staring at the progress bar and waiting a couple minutes for the right moment to click a button. In other words, it's one of those simple but tedious things you'd want to automate.

I wish every standard player had this, but as far as I have seen that is not the case.

I'm still not seeing a difference.

If for example I'm playing a playlist from... Any player, but let's say YouTube Music. I hit the repeat button until it sets to "Repeat Once", it will play to the end of the song and then stop.

It won't effect the queue or playback in any other way.

Audacious has that on the Playback menu or ctrl+m, there's also a No Playlist Advance mode.

I haven't found out how to stop it popping up an error when trying to play deleted/unsupported files, if anyone knows?

Hmm, wasn't there a music player called musickube or musikube or similar? I remember this being very lightweight and one of the only decent ones back before switching to Grooveshark. Can't find it when searching now, probably I'm getting the ck wrong and its SEO must be terrible compared to the various companies with names like this.

it's by the same developer Casey Langen. Instead of creating another win32 UI app he went cross-platform and console-based.

The original musikcube was an eyeopener to me, demonstrating sqlites performance.

I use Musikcube a lot, it works great on macOS and Linux, and is snappy even on very cheap or old systems. It has very good mouse support (if your terminal emulator supports it), it's the first time I saw a TUI app with a right click menu, or that you can scroll through.

My one major complaint is that there is no way I know of to import/export playlists: https://github.com/clangen/musikcube/issues/141

Another similar program I use when I am unable or unwilling to install musikcube for some reason is cmus: https://cmus.github.io/

Does it let me browse my collection without disturbing the current playing queue? Does it support searching by any friends, including my custom tags? If so, I'm in.

This looks great. Does it support streaming to Airplay devices?

You could combine it with Snapcast to achieve that

HM from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31502845

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