10-console-music-players-for-linux

src: http://www.tuxarena.com/2011/12/10-console-music-players-for-linux/

10 Console Music Players for Linux
Craciun Dan | December 3, 2011
CMus
This is one of the best, feature-rich players for console. Built using ncurses and thus offering a text user interface, CMus has several view modes, organizes your music by artist/album, provides playlists and a library view, a filebrowser, it allows searching, Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbling via this script, and it uses Vi-like keyboard shortcuts. A complete review can be found here and a guide to using it here.
Homepage

CMus is a powerful, feature-rich music player for the terminal which uses the Ncurses library:

cmus


mp3blaster
mp3blaster is one of the most popular music players for the terminal out there. It uses the ncurses toolkit, and has features like grouping of tracks, playlists, shuffle and repeat modes.
Homepage

mp3blaster

MOC
MOC stands for Music on Console and it is a twin-panel music player with the file browser to the left and the playlist to the right. MOC is built upon ncurses and allows shuffle, repeat, volume control.
Homepage

MOC running in Ubuntu 11.10:

moc

Herrie
Another ncurses-based music player for the terminal, Herrie is a minimalistic player that comes with playlists, support for various audio files, including Ogg and MP3, jump to next/previous song.
Homepage

MPlayer
This is MPlayer, the famous video/audio player and converter. However MPlayer can also be used as a command-line audio player, and it supports all the formats out there, including Ogg, FLAC, MP3 or WAV.
Homepage

SoX
Self-described as “Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army Knife of audio manipulation”, SoX is actually a powerful command-line audio manipulation tool which can also be used as a music player, using the command play music_file.
Homepage

PyTone
Written in Python, PyTone is yet another command-line audio player. Simple and clean, it supports formats like MP3 or Ogg.
Homepage

PyRadio
Another program written in Python, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside the terminal. To use it, download it from here, unzip the archive and then run the ./pyradio script.
Homepage

With preselected stations, PyRadio is able to play Internet radio inside a terminal:



ogg123
This little command-line tool is included in the vorbis-tools package and is able to reproduce Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. It’s very basic, yet very fast and useful for quickly listening to songs which are encoded in a free format.
Homepage

The command-line player ogg123 plays the free formats Vorbis and FLAC:

ogg123

mpg123
Just as ogg123, only that mpg123 plays the MP3 format.
Homepage

21 Comments
Posted in Reviews, Software
Tagged as cli, cmus, moc, mp3blaster, mplayer, ogg123, tui
 	6r00k14n says:
December 4, 2011 at 2:08 AM
You missed one. Orpheus. It is a basically a text-based interface for mpg123 and ogg123, and based on my experience, it is a better choice than mp3blaster, particularly when dealing with pecular soundcards.

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	Craciun Dan says:
December 4, 2011 at 2:24 AM
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this one. Looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2006?

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	dr says:
December 4, 2011 at 3:05 AM
ncmpcpp needs to be included. It’s an ncurses based client for MPD, and it’s my favorite audio player by far . . . I even prefer it over GUI players.

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	Quake_Sinatra says:
December 4, 2011 at 6:35 AM
+1 ncmpc – by far the best console client i have used, and extremely light and quick

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	g99 says:
December 5, 2011 at 1:42 PM
I think you’d like ncmpcpp a lot. It is highly customizable and has a nice tag editor which I haven’t found in other console-based music players. In my opinion it is not just comparable to CMus, it beats it.

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	yoander says:
December 5, 2011 at 3:16 PM
I’ve used CMUS for a long while and it’s rock solid, full featured and well documented music player. Support a lot of formats and sounds servers (Pulse audio, ALSA and maybe others). It’s in heavy development and for vim fans simulate vim key bindings.

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	Craciun Dan says:
December 5, 2011 at 5:04 PM
It’s my favorite too. The moment I tried it one year ago or so I felt like it’s the player I’ll like the most for CLI.

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	drprometheus says:
December 5, 2011 at 4:52 PM
Ncmpcpp Rules!!!

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	Craciun Dan says:
December 5, 2011 at 5:03 PM
Now that’s definitely a lot of votes for ncmpcpp :) I’ll give it a try, maybe make a review.

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	Dennis Kibbe says:
December 6, 2011 at 3:44 PM
Emacs users have EMMS (Emacs Multimedia System) for playing music within the Emacs text editor.

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	wlf says:
October 25, 2013 at 2:53 PM
cplay by Ulf Betlehem also is a good choice

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	coco says:
December 12, 2013 at 7:06 PM
is there any console player which can be used for radio streaming?

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	artem says:
June 1, 2015 at 6:27 AM
sure u can use MPD best console player for radio streaming!

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	artem says:
June 1, 2015 at 6:29 AM
just write one line in terminal for listen OGG/OPUS radio streams

> wget -qO- http://ai-radio.org/128.opus | opusdec – – | aplay -qfdat

Be sure u have already installed opus tools

Enjoy

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	artem says:
June 1, 2015 at 6:32 AM
for listen OGG/Vorbis radio streams just write

> ogg123 http://ai-radio.org

Lets Fun

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	hyphop says:
June 30, 2015 at 12:21 PM
for listen OGG/OPUS radio streams – small script from there
https://ai-radio.org/chronos/2015-06-08-opus123-command-line-radio-player

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	cycro says:
October 11, 2015 at 11:04 AM
http://sourceforge.net/p/opencubicplayer/code/ci/master/tree/

Add ocp please

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	Craciun Dan says:
October 11, 2015 at 9:50 PM
Thank you for the suggestion, I’ll have a look at it as soon as possible and eventually add it.

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	Prince says:
August 2, 2016 at 11:02 AM
MOC seems really nice and easy to use.

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	Andre says:
September 18, 2017 at 9:50 PM
Takes close to only 1 % of the CPU ans the same for memory! I love it to listen to FLAC, AAC, MP3 to a McIntosh Labs system in DAC mode.

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	def says:
September 11, 2018 at 7:14 AM
You can use fmedia (http://fmedia.firmdev.com) to play music from Linux terminal. For example, to play just 1 file use this command:

fmedia song.mp3

Or you can play the whole directory:

fmedia ~/Music/Artist

It supports simple commands (Next/Previous, Volume control, etc.) and a reach set of command-line options. fmedia is a portable application (works without installation, doesn’t need any libraries installed on your system) and consumes very small amount of system resources.

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