So long as I’m mentioning interesting little projects, finferflu has come up with a very handy Jamendo tag browser that runs from the command line.
“What?!,” you say. “A primitive command-line tag browser for a music networking service?! What good is that?”
“What?!,” I say. “Can’t you see the beauty in that?!” You screen the site by tags and can pluck albums one-by-one, and preview (pre-listen?) to them without loading pages or waiting on Java and Flash doodads. Enter your choice, listen, then decide if you want it. Best of all, it’s light as a feather and won’t hog your system resources. And you can run it on ancient equipment too.
It’s a beautiful thing, that command line. And don’t even think about trying to argue to the contrary, unless you can come up with something just as light, just as fast and just as intuitive in a GUI. I dare you. I double dare you. I double dog dare you.
And when you’re done, I have a 430Mhz machine I want to try it out on. Then we’ll see if it compares to finferflu’s.
His script is here on the Arch forums, but it’s completely independent of distro (I even tried it on my XO). It needs mpc and mpd as well as w3m, all installed and configured. Someone has already come up with an option for moc instead; I’m tinkering with it to see if I can get it to work with mp321 but I keep getting distracted. 
I just downloaded it… Kudos to finferflu for such a great script.
awesome!! no more stupid java wait times 😀
Thanks for this nice review 🙂
It looks like we share the same goals, because that’s exactly the reason why I have created it. I wanted a quick interface to just get the “job” done 😀
I’m happy you liked it 🙂
I don’t know that it’s fair to compare GUIs with CLIs when it comes to performance, especially on lower-spec machines. Sure if you’re a speed freak (which I know you are 🙂 ) it may be important. But GUIs (especially simple ones for small apps) are often more intuitive than CLIs. That intuitiveness comes at a cost, and I don’t think you’d disagree if I said everyone has to decide for themselves whether that cost is worth it.
All that said, I’d probably go with the CLI app 🙂
Great, I’ve been looking for a script like this for quite a while, looking into mpc, mpd, and mp3 on my XO right now.
@Lucas, not necessarily, for instance tar is clearly more user friendly than any GUI app could be, the same is true for wget. This group of programs is small however, it is based on how much the program cares about where one puts things.
It’s fantastic!