Who Needs Winamp When You Can Play Music from the Terminal

There's been a lot of talk about the demise of the iconic Winamp media player on the Windows platform, but Linux users have nothing to fear. Even if all the music players go unmaintained, there's still the terminal.

Most of the things you can do with a GUI, are also doable in a terminal. The same is true for music players. You don't need a fancy GUI to play music, especially when you have an all-powerful terminal at your fingertips.

A good example for this kind of terminal-based media player is the “C* Music Player.” You can install it from the Ubuntu repository, if you are running an Ubuntu OS, or you can compile it from source. This is rather easy because it has very few dependencies.

“C* Music Player” supports a large number or formats, you can organize playlists, the response time of the terminal is almost perfect, and you can still access the shell while listening to music.

Small and fast text mode music player

CMus is a small and fast music player using the ncurses library.

CMus has vi-style command interface, e.g. searching using '/' or '?' and adding files to playlist ':add ~/foo.ogg'.

Here are some key features of "CMus - C* Music Player":

Input:
FLAC
Ogg/Vorbis
MP3 (libmad)
Wav
Modules (libmodplug)

Output:
ALSA
OSS
ARTS
MP3 and Ogg streaming (Shoutcast/Icecast)
WinAmp / XMMS keys "zxcvb"
Can be controlled via UNIX socket
Serial port remote controller support (irman)
Customizable colors
Nice vi-style interface with tabulator expansion
Background playlist loading
Track metadata database makes adding files to playlist very fast.
Album/artist modes. Playing within one album or artist.
Playlist is always kept sorted.
Play queue
Directory browser
Full UTF-8 support

You can download the C* Music Player