MOC: The cplay I always wanted

11 Replies

I am really scratching my head these days, trying to figure out how MOC escaped my attention for so long. I’ve tried more than my share of console music players, sometimes with success, and sometimes not. But I have absolutely no recollection, Your Honor, of ever seeing or trying MOC.

Which is a low down dirty shame. Just about every improvement to cplay I had ever hoped for — with absolutely no hope of ever seeing, really, since it has since fallen completely out of development (even the home page is gone) — is already in MOC.

I always thought cplay could do with a two-pane arrangement for jumping between file navigation and playlist. MOC has that.

I always thought cplay would benefit from more color than just white. MOC has a nice color scheme by default, and you can switch themes (themes?! In a console application?! šŸ˜Æ ) at a keypress.

I always thought cplay could use a few more basic additions, like handling streaming audio, or some more complex readouts. And of course, MOC has a progress bar, timers, file type display and track time, plus a bitrate counter, track control display … too many to explain. Just look at it instead.

That’s it on the right in the center, in blue. Two-pane display, more counters and indicators than you can shake a stick at, and a pretty color scheme to boot. Streaming audio, multiple file type support, easy playlist management, fine and coarse volume controls. Everything.

I think I’m in love. šŸ˜Æ

P.S.: Yes, I tried cmus, but I’m afraid MOC won out quite easily.

11 thoughts on “MOC: The cplay I always wanted”

  2. Dr Small

    You could have at least told me that the command is mocp and saved me 5 minutes. šŸ˜› I like it. One thing that I can’t figure out, is changing volume control.

    It says, M-1, but what modifier is M ?
    I’ve tried everything on my keyboard.

    Reply ↓
    1. K.Mandla Post author

      I’m not sure about the M-series keys; I’ve been using the greater-than and less-than keys for fine control, and the comma and period for coarse. Does that work for you?

      P.S.: I deliberately left out the mocp command just to infuriate my old friend Dr Small. šŸ˜ˆ

      Reply ↓
  3. Vanity Vertigo

    Yeah, gotta love moc. One of the only things keeping me from using it (even over my favroite mpd) is the lack of last.fm support. There have been a few hacks to get it working but it’s either too complicated or it doesn’t turn out right for me.

    You’ve probably already seen it but PolishLinux has two good articles on moc.

    http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/moc-console-audio-player-for-linux/
    http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/moc-audio-player-advanced-tricks/

    Reply ↓
  4. Greg

    I agree that moc is nice. It has a main advantage that it has very simple keybindings. I like that you can toggle the playlist to use all the terminal screen just by pressing l.
    IMO it has 3 disadvantages, and these are the reasons why i am not using it.
    It has an ugly interface. The progress bar on bottom, i dont like and theres no way to get rid of it.
    It is VERY slow while reading large playlists (read tags).
    It is not actively maintained, despite of some bugfixes.
    If 2/3 are not that important, no.2 is a no go for me.
    I prefer ncmpc.

    Reply ↓
  5. Nergui

    @Greg:

    Your 1st problem can be worked around by just changing the theme to “black_theme”. It gets rid of the progressbar and the colors both at once.

    Moc is still my favorite music player, but the one feature I miss from XMMS is a plugin for mplayer support. I know someone has hacked this feature into cplay, but I would much rather see it in this player. It’d make my experience complete.

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  6. karthik

    I abandoned Rhythmbox in favour of this nugget- MOC really is a heaven-send. The only problem by far is that it can’t do recursive searches, which cplay handles fine.

    Reply ↓
  7. stephen

    Ha! turns out I learned about something new from you, yet again! I had complained that nobody spoke of the cmus (which is a really good app), but I’m trying out mocp for the first time, and really love it. clean interface, easy to learn, themable, yadda.

    thanks, kmanla!

    Reply ↓

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