Dhun - Minimalist Music Player for OS X | Hacker News Reader

Dhun - Minimalist Music Player for OS X

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22 pointsdeepakjois15 comments

Anyone who likes this should also check out mpd:

http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki

More work to configure, but also works on Linux. There's a wonderful ncurses interface called ncmpc as well. mpd + ncmpc has been my iTunes in a terminal window for years.

It was actually a few annoyances with MPD that led me to create Dhun. This was a while ago so things might a have changed. But my main grievances were:

* Installation on OS X wasnt very straightforward. I think the MacPorts version was broken and I had to do some stuff manually to get it to install

* Some of my ID3 tags and MP3 files were not recognised properly, even though they worked fine on iTunes.

I've been looking for something like this, here are some suggestions:

- system-wide keyboard shortcuts (I believe there is a Carbon API for this that you could use). It'd be great if you could hook the default Pause/Play buttons on the Macbook keyboard, not sure if this is possible

- possibly some kind of current track menu item (I wrote one for iTunes here: http://silentmac.com/?p=470 ), requires Cocoa. Just to display the current song (some of my music has long, quiet intros, and I'm not sure what song is playing in the beginning), this might go against your idea of minimalist though

- shuffle functionality

But it looks great so far!

system-wide keyboard shortcuts (I believe there is a Carbon API for this that you could use). It'd be great if you could hook the default Pause/Play buttons on the Macbook keyboard, not sure if this is possible

This worked fine on Leopard, but on Snow Leopard the play button on the MacBook keyboard just launches iTunes. I usually chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes to suppress this annoying behavior (my default music player is Songbird).

Shuffle is something that can be done easily.

As for the other requests, you are right it may not be quite minimalist :). But will keep them in mind.

$ gem install dhun Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gemcutter.org ERROR: could not find dhun locally or in a repository

hm ...

You you should update to the latest version of Rubygems.

    gem update --system

Thats my first gem ;) Thanks for the help!

In response to TomasSedovic (I don't see "reply" links for some reason): "dhun" is the Hindi word for "tune". So I believe some thought did go into the name :)

Edit: "dhun" has U as in 'put', not as in 'gut'.

Why would anyone want to use this over mpg123? It is already "minimalist" running from the command line and can donwhatever you need it to do. I use mpg123 all the time, it's great

Don't you have to give mpg123 an explicit path to an mp3 file? dhun lets you play mp3 files by searching for them, through the Spotlight database.

Wish you put more thought into the name, it being commandline and all. Hard to type on qwerty AND dvorak...

Other than that, looks interesting.

Hm, seems that using `mdfind` is rather slow. Probably using Spotlight's API via RubyCocoa/MacRuby will be faster?

I am not using the Spotlight API via mdfind. I wrote a C extension. Care to elaborate on the issue (file a bug maybe)?

A commandline interface for playing music in Mac OS X

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