Cmus Knowpia

cmus
	cmus in the artist/album view
Original author(s)	Timo Hirvonen
Initial release	June 5, 2005; 18 years ago
Stable release	2.10.0 (July 5, 2022; 21 months ago) [±]
Repository	github.com/cmus/cmus ;
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Available in	English
Type	Audio player
License	GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	cmus.github.io

cmus (C Music Player) is a console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later and is operated exclusively through a text-based user interface, built with ncurses.

Employing a text-only design significantly reduces the resource demands for the program's operation, making it an optimal selection for underpowered computer systems. Moreover, it is advantageous for systems that do not possess a GUI, such as the X Window System. In some cases, using a terminal application can significantly accelerate navigating through the program.

History edit

cmus was originally written by Timo Hirvonen. At around June 2008, he discontinued development of cmus, which resulted in a fork named "cmus-unofficial" in November 2008. After a year of development, a takeover request was sent to SourceForge, which was granted after a 90-day period without response from the original author.^[2] This resulted in a merge of the fork back into the official project in February 2010.^[3]

User interface edit

The interface of cmus is centered on views. There are two views on the music library (an artist/album tree and a flat sortable list) and views on playlists, the current play queue, the file system and for filters/settings. There is always only one view visible at any time.

Owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard. Commands are loosely modeled after those of the vi text editor. General operation mimics being in command-mode of vi, where complex commands are issued by prepending them with a colon, (e.g. ":add /home/user/music-dir"), simpler, more common commands are bound to individual keys, such as "j/k" moving down/up, or "x" starting playback, and searches beginning with "/" as in "/the beatles".

Core features edit

cmus in the List view

cmus in the File Browser view

cmus in the Filter view

Support for multiple audio formats: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, Wav, MPEG-4/AAC, ALAC, WMA, APE, TTA, SHN and MOD.
Gapless playback
ReplayGain support
MP3 and Ogg streaming (SHOUTcast/Icecast)
Powerful music library filters / live filtering
Play queue
Compilations handling
Customizable colors and dynamic keybindings
Vi style search and command mode
Remotely controllable through cmus-remote program (UNIX socket or TCP/IP)
Compatibility with numerous Unix-like systems, including Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Cygwin and OpenWrt^[4]

Keybindings edit

Here is a list of some common keybindings to interact with cmus while in the terminal, taken from the official manpage on a Linux distribution:


Command	cmus name	Action triggered
b	player-next	play next track
c	player-pause	pause current track
x	player-play	play current track (after being paused)
z	player-prev	play previous track
v	player-stop	stops current track and sets timestamp to 00:00
B	play-next-album	play next album (if available in current directory)
Z	player-prev-album	play previous album (if available in current directory)
left (left arrow key)	seek -5	goes back 5 seconds in current track
right (right arrow key)	seek +5	goes forward 5 seconds in current track

References edit

^ Initial release tag
^ "SourceForge Ticket #6365". Archived from the original on 12 November 2012. Retrieved 27 June 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^ "Freshmeat announcement: cmus is alive". Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 24 April 2014.
^ https://dev.openwrt.org/changeset/26784 cmus added to OpenWrt