One thing I forgot to mention, in a recent slurry of real-life responsibilities that overtook my free time, was that I managed to recover a smidgin of audio performance on my Pentium laptop, by substituting orpheus for moc.
If you remember a month or two ago, I skimmed through a rather hefty list of audio players for the console (and some that were “linked” to graphical environments too) and mentioned that orpheus would be my No. 2 choice (with herrie as No. 3), if I didn’t like moc quite so much. That list proved to be useful to me too, because mocp was simply overloading the playback process.
It’s something I described a while back, and so I won’t go into too much detail here. When I yanked all of moc and its subsidiaries, and injected orpheus and its requirements, I was able to listen to audio files without suffering a stutter effect, or without needing command-line controls to manage playback. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things, but so long as I have a machine that can manage to play audio and show some sort of interface, I’d like to stick with that.
orpheus itself is clean and easy to manage, with keyboard cues on the screen, a status display at the top and a playlist taking up the remainder of the landscape. It can handle playlists and audio files of several different formats, and supposedly it can handle broadcast streams too, but I’m not sure of what format, because straightforward .pls files don’t seem to work for me.
moc is still my weapon of choice though. I consider orpheus to be a substitute, and that’s because — and the irony of this situation is — not long after I pinned down a solution to the stuttering playback problem, I swapped roles for that machine and another, and all of my day-to-day work is done on the Pentium, while the Thinkpad handles audio and video off to the side. So in the end, I used a completely different machine for entertainment, and audio playback wasn’t an issue. Isn’t that the way things work? 😐
Really liking orpheus, not having all the bells and whistles that moc has but does the job nevertheless. I like the remote function too. Not sure how you would start it up in the background yet, but will figure that out.
Any easy way to make playlists from a folder/directory (without using a player to load and create? Thinking of a simple command line solution? (also to bear in mind that all my music is accessed remotely via nfs shares.
Making playlists a “simple” script
(went away and figured it out myself with help from code snippets scattered around the interweb)
##################
#!/bin/bash
export IFS=$’\n’
for i in $(find $1 -name “*.mp3” -type f)
do
echo “$i” |sed ‘s/..\(.*\)/\1/’ >> ${PWD##*/}.m3u
done
shuf ${PWD##*/}.m3u > ${PWD##*/}2.m3u
shuf ${PWD##*/}2.m3u > ${PWD##*/}.m3u
rm ${PWD##*/}2.m3u
###################
You can leave out the last three lines if you don’t want to shuffle the list.
This can also be turned into a thunar custom action if you like that sort of thing 🙂
Damn, sorry. You need to add this as the first line to the script:
####################
touch ${PWD##*/}.m3u
####################
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