NAME¶
moosic - a command-line client for the Moosic jukebox system.
SYNOPSIS¶
moosic [
options]
command [
options] [
command
arguments]
DESCRIPTION¶
The
moosic program is the command-line interface to the Moosic jukebox
system. It communicates with
moosicd(1), the Moosic server, querying the
server for information and telling the server what to do.
moosic will
not be able to do very much unless
moosicd is running. When
moosicd isn't already running,
moosic will automatically start
it for you, unless you specifically request otherwise (with the
--no-startserver option).
USAGE¶
moosic works by sending a command to the Moosic server and returning the
response, if any. The first non-option argument given to
moosic is the
name of the command to be performed. This command name is case-insensitive,
and all non-alphanumeric characters in it are ignored. You can use the
"help" command to quickly and easily view the names of all the
available commands and to get a brief description of individual commands. You
can also use "moosic --showcommands" to display the short
descriptions of all the commands at once. The "COMMANDS" section
below lists the full details of each command. There are very many commands, so
you should start by just learning a few commonly used commands, and only
learning others as you feel the need. I recommend starting with the following
short command vocabulary: add, list, stop, play, and shuffle.
For example, "moosic add foo.mp3" adds the file
foo.mp3 (in the
current directory) to the end of the song queue and returns you immediately
back to your shell prompt without printing any output (unless an error
occurs). Compare with "moosic list", which will list the contents of
the song queue. Note that if the song queue is empty, "moosic list"
will not display anything.
OPTIONS¶
Most of the options for
moosic are only relevant if they are used with
one of the commands that take a
filelist argument. See
"COMMANDS" for the definition of a
filelist. The only
shuffling options that don't mutually exclude each other are
-d and
-a. Shuffling options that are named later on the command line take
precedence over ones that occur earlier. All options must be named immediately
before the
command given to
moosic or immediately after the
command; options placed within the list of the command's arguments will
not be interpreted as options.
- -g, --shuffle-global
- This option causes moosic to shuffle the entire filelist
after directory expansion has taken place, before sending the
filelist to the Moosic server. This is the default behavior. This
option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that
accepts a filelist.
- -d, --shuffle-dir
- This option causes moosic to shuffle the results of expanding the
directories named in the filelist. This option is only meaningful
if used in conjunction with a command that accepts a filelist.
- -a, --shuffle-args
- This option causes moosic to shuffle the actual command line
arguments that comprise the filelist. This option is only
meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that accepts a
filelist.
- -o, --inorder
- When this option is used, moosic doesn't shuffle the
filelist named on the command line at all. Rather, the order
specified on the command line is preserved. This option is only meaningful
if used in conjunction with a command that accepts a filelist.
- -s, --sort
- When this option is used, moosic sorts the filelist
lexicographically after it has been expanded (through directory recursion
or auto-finding or the like). The order specified on the command line is
ignored. This option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a
command that accepts a filelist.
- -r, --no-recurse
- Using this option prevents moosic from replacing directories named
in the filelist with a recursive traversal of their contents.
- -n, --no-file-munge
- Using this option prevents moosic from modifying the names in the
expanded filelist. Normally, moosic converts relative
filenames into absolute filenames before sending the names to
moosicd, but this is generally not desirable behavior if you want
to insert items that aren't local files into the queue (such as URLs).
This option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that
accepts a filelist.
- -i, --ignore-case
- Treats any given regular expressions as if they were case-insensitive.
This option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that
accepts one or more regular expressions as arguments. This option is
syntactic sugar, since the regular expressions supported by Moosic can
also be made case-insensitive by including "(?i)" within the
regular expression.
- -f, --auto-find
- This option causes each string in the filelist with the results of
performing a "fuzzy" search for music files. "Fuzzy"
matching is done by simplifying all the candidate filenames (by lowering
the case and removing all non-alphanumeric characters except slashes) and
then testing to see if the search string (which has been similarly
simplified) is contained in any of the filenames. The list of candidate
filenames is obtained by recursively traversing the file hierarchy rooted
at the directory specified by the --music-dir option (which has a
default value of ~/music/).
For example, if you use "moosic -f add severedgoddess", and the
file ~/music/Meat_Puppets/Severed_Goddess_Hand.mp3 exists, then
this file will be included in the list of files to be added to the queue.
Similarly, if you use "moosic -f pre nesad", and the directory
~/music/J/Jane's Addiction/ exists, then all the files in this
directory (and its subdirectories) will be included in the list of files
to be prepended to the queue.
This option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that
accepts a filelist. Beware that using this option can cause
moosic to take a long time to complete if the directory tree being
searched contains a very large number of files.
- -F, --auto-grep
- This option enables behavior very much like that of the --auto-find
option, except that regular expression searching is used instead of the
"fuzzy" search scheme. Specifically, each string in the
filelist is treated as a regular expression, and is replaced with
all the filenames that match the expression. As with --auto-find,
the filenames that are eligible for matching are obtained by traversing
the directory named with the --music-dir option (defaulting to
~/music/ if --music-dir is not used). Essentially,
"moosic -F prepend something" is semantically equivalent to
"moosic prepend `find ~/music/ | grep something`", but is
syntactically a lot sweeter.
This option is only meaningful if used in conjunction with a command that
accepts a filelist. Beware that using this option can cause
moosic to take a long time to complete if the directory tree being
searched contains a very large number of files.
- -m directory, --music-dir directory
- This option controls which directory is used for searching when the
"auto-find" or "auto-grep" feature is enabled. These
automatic searches are limited to the file hierarchy rooted at the
directory specified by this option. When this option is not used, the
~/music/ directory is used as a default. This option is only
meaningful if either --auto-find or --auto-grep is
used.
- -S, --showcommands
- Prints a list of the commands that may be used with moosic and then
exits. Note that this output is quite copious, so you will probably want
to pipe it to a text pager, such as less.
- -h, --help
- Prints a short help message that explains the command line options and
then exits.
- -v, --version
- Prints version information and then exits.
- -c directory, --config-dir directory
- This option is not needed under normal circumstances. It should only be
used if you want moosic to communicate with an instance of
moosicd which was invoked with the -c/--config
option. Using this option tells moosic to search the specified
directory for the files which are usually found in ~/.moosic/.
- -t host:port, --tcp
host:port
- This option tells moosic to communicate with a Moosic server that
is listening to the specified TCP/IP port on the specified host. Running a
Moosic server that accepts requests via TCP/IP is not recommended because
it is a security risk.
- -N, --no-startserver
- This option prevents moosic from trying to automatically start
moosicd if it can't contact a Moosic server.
- -U, --allow-unplayable
- This option allows songs that the server doesn't know how to play to be
added into the song queue.
- -C, --current-in-list
- This option causes the currently playing song to be printed at the top of
the output of the "list" and "plainlist" commands. It
has no effect if an argument is given to these commands or if used with
other commands.
COMMANDS¶
Any of these commands may be specified with any mixture of upper-case and
lower-case letters, and non-alphabetic characters (such as '-') may be
omitted.
Many of these commands accept a
range argument. A
range is a pair
of colon-separated numbers. Such a
range addresses all items whose
index in the song queue is both greater than or equal to the first number and
less than the second number. For example, "3:7" addresses items 3,
4, 5, and 6. If the first number in the pair is omitted, then the
range
starts at the beginning of the song queue. If the second number in the pair is
omitted, then the
range extends to include the last item in the song
queue. A
range can also be a single number (with no colon), in which
case it addresses the single item whose index is that of the given number.
Negative numbers may be used to index items from the end of the list instead
of the beginning. Thus, -1 refers to the last item in the song queue, -2
refers to the second-to-last item, etc.
Beware that a negative number that immediately follows a moosic
command
is liable to be incorrectly interpreted as an option, so option processing
should be explicitly terminated with an argument of "--" between the
command and the number. This is illustrated by the following example,
which removes the last item in the queue: "moosic del -- -1"
Alternatively (and perhaps more conveniently), you can prevent negative numbers
from being interpreted as options by preceding the range with a single
character that can't be mistaken for a number or an option (i.e. any character
that isn't a digit or a dash). Example: "moosic list /-15:-9". You
can also place such a character at the end of the range if you think it makes
it look prettier. Example: "moosic list /-15:-9/". The bracketing
characters surrounding a range need not be the same: "moosic shuffle
'[-13:8]'". Notice how the preceding example surrounded the range in
quotes to prevent the shell from treating the "[" and "]"
characters specially (since shells have a habit of doing things like that).
These commands print useful bits of information to standard output.
- help [command ...]
- Prints a brief description of the moosic commands named as arguments. If
no arguments are given, a list of all the available moosic commands is
printed.
- current
- Print the name of the song that is currently playing.
- curr
- An alias for "current".
- current-time [format]
- Print the amount of time that the current song has been playing. By
default, this time is printed in a format of
"hours:minutes:seconds", but if a different format is desired, a
string argument can be given to specify it. The format should be a string
that is appropriate for passing to the strftime(3) function.
- list [range]
- Print the list of items in the current song queue. A whole number is
printed before each item in the list, indicating its position in the
queue. If a range is specified, only the items that fall within that range
are listed. Remember that the song queue does not contain the currently
playing song.
- plainlist [range]
- Print the current song queue without numbering each line. If a range is
specified, only the items that fall within that range are listed. This
output is suitable for saving to a file which can be reloaded by the
"pl-append", "pl-prepend", "pl-insert", and
"pl-mixin" commands.
- history [number]
- Print a list of items that were recently played. The times mentioned in
the output of this command represents the time that a song finished
playing. If a number is specified, then no more than that number of
entries will be printed. If a number is not specified, then the entire
history is printed. Note that moosicd limits the number of items
stored in its history list.
- hist [number]
- An alias for "history".
- state
- Print the current state of the music daemon.
- status
- An alias for "state".
- length
- Print the number of items in the queue.
- len
- An alias for "length".
- ispaused
- Show whether the current song is paused or not. If the song is paused,
"True" is printed and moosic returns normally. If the
song is not paused, "False" is printed and moosic returns
with a non-zero exit status (which happens to be 2 for no particular
reason).
- islooping
- Show whether the server is in loop mode. If the server is in loop mode,
"True" is printed and moosic returns normally. If not,
"False" is printed and moosic returns with a non-zero
exit status (which happens to be 2 for no particular reason).
- isadvancing
- Show whether the server is advancing through the song queue. If the server
is advancing, "True" is printed and moosic returns
normally. If not, "False" is printed and moosic returns
with a non-zero exit status (which happens to be 2 for no particular
reason).
- version
- Print version information for both the client and the server, and then
exit.
Adding to the song queue¶
These commands will add to the queue of items to be played. Many of these
commands accept a
filelist argument. A
filelist is a list of one
or more files or directories. Any directories named in the list will be
replaced by a list of files produced by recursively traversing the contents of
the directory (unless the
--no-file-munge option or
--no-recurse
option is being used). Depending on the shuffling options specified when
invoking
moosic, the list will be shuffled before being added to the
Moosic server's queue.
- append filelist
- Add the files to be played to the end of the song queue.
- add filelist
- An alias for "append".
- pl-append playlist-file ...
- Add the items listed in the given playlist files to the end of the song
queue. If "-" (a single dash) is given as the name of a playlist
file, data will be read from from standard input instead of trying to read
from a file named "-".
- pl-add playlist-file ...
- An alias for "pl-append".
- prepend filelist
- Add the files to be played to the beginning of the song queue.
- pre filelist
- An alias for "prepend".
- pl-prepend playlist-file ...
- Add the items listed in the given playlist files to the beginning of the
song queue. If "-" (a single dash) is given as the name of a
playlist file, data will be read from from standard input instead of
trying to read from a file named "-".
- mixin filelist
- Add the files to the song queue and reshuffle the entire song queue.
- pl-mixin playlist-file ...
- Add the items listed in the given playlist files to the song queue and
reshuffle the entire song queue. If "-" (a single dash) is given
as the name of a playlist file, data will be read from from standard input
instead of trying to read from a file named "-".
- replace filelist
- Replace the current contents of the song queue with the songs contained in
the filelist.
- pl-replace playlist-file ...
- Replace the current contents of the song queue with the songs named in the
given playlists.
- insert filelist index
- Insert the given items at a given point in the song queue. The items are
inserted such that they will precede the item that previously occupied the
specified index.
- pl-insert playlist-file ... index
- Insert the items specified in the given playlist files at a specified
point in the song queue. If "-" (a single dash) is given as the
name of a playlist file, data will be read from from standard input
instead of trying to read from a file named "-".
- putback
- Reinsert the current song at the start of the song queue.
- stagger-add filelist
- Adds the file list to the end of the song queue, but only after
rearranging it into a "staggered" order. This staggered order is
very similar the order created by the stagger command (described
below). Each element of the file list (before replacing directories with
their contents) specifies a category into which the expanded file list
will be divided. The staggered order of the list being added is formed by
taking the first item from each category in turn until all the categories
are empty. This may be a bit difficult to understand without an example,
so here is a typical case:
Initially, the queue contains a few items.
[0] /music/a.ogg
[1] /music/b.mp3
[2] /music/c.mid
Additionally, there are two directories that each contain a few files:
$ ls /music/X/ /music/Y/
X:
1.ogg 2.ogg 3.ogg
Y:
1.ogg 2.ogg 3.ogg 4.ogg
After executing "moosic -o stagger-add /music/Y /music/X", the
queue now contains:
[0] /music/a.ogg
[1] /music/b.mp3
[2] /music/c.mid
[3] /music/Y/1.ogg
[4] /music/X/1.ogg
[5] /music/Y/2.ogg
[6] /music/X/2.ogg
[7] /music/Y/3.ogg
[8] /music/X/3.ogg
[9] /music/Y/4.ogg
- stagger-merge filelist
- Adds the given file list to the queue in an interleaved fashion. More
specifically, the new song queue will consist of a list that alternates
between the items from the given file list and the items from the existing
song queu. For example, if the queue initially contains:
[0] /music/a.ogg
[1] /music/b.mp3
[2] /music/c.mid
And the /music/Y/ directory contains:
1.ogg 2.ogg 3.ogg 4.ogg
Then, after executing "moosic -o stagger-merge /music/Y", the
queue will contain:
[0] /music/Y/1.ogg
[1] /music/a.ogg
[2] /music/Y/2.ogg
[3] /music/b.mp3
[4] /music/Y/3.ogg
[5] /music/c.mid
[6] /music/Y/4.ogg
- interval-add interval filelist
- Inserts the given songs into the current song queue with a regular
frequency that is specified with the given interval argument (which
must be an integer).
For example, if the queue initially contains:
[0] /music/a.mod
[1] /music/b.mod
[2] /music/c.mod
[3] /music/d.mod
[4] /music/e.mod
[5] /music/f.mod
[6] /music/g.mod
And the /music/Z directory contains:
aleph.wav bet.wav gimmel.wav
Then, after executing "moosic -o interval-add 3 /music/Z", the
queue will contain:
[0] aleph.wav
[1] /music/a.mod
[2] /music/b.mod
[3] bet.wav
[4] /music/c.mod
[5] /music/d.mod
[6] gimmel.wav
[7] /music/e.mod
[8] /music/f.mod
[9] /music/g.mod
Removing from the song queue¶
These commands will remove from the queue of items to be played.
- cut range
- Removes all song queue items that fall within the given range.
- del range
- An alias for "cut".
- crop range
- Removes all song queue items that do not fall within the given range.
- remove regex ...
- Remove all song queue items that match the given regular expression. If
multiple regular expressions are given, any song that matches any one of
the expressions will be removed.
- filter regex ...
- Remove all song queue items that do not match the given regular
expression. If multiple regular expressions are given, only those songs
that match all the regular expressions will remain afterward.
- clear
- Clear the song queue.
- wipe
- Clear the song queue and stop the current song.
Rearranging the song queue¶
These commands let you change the order of the items in the queue.
- move range index
- Moves all items in the given range to a new position in the song queue. If
you want to move items to the end of the queue, use "`moosic
length`" as the final argument. For example, to move the first 10
songs to the end of the queue, use the following command: "moosic
move 0:10 `moosic length`"
- move-pattern regex index
- Moves all items that match the given regular expression to a new position
in the song queue.
- swap range range
- Causes the songs contained within the two specified ranges to trade
places.
- reshuffle [range]
- Reshuffle the song queue. If a range is specified, only items that fall
within that range will be shuffled.
- shuffle [range]
- An alias for "reshuffle".
- sort [range]
- Rearrange the song queue in sorted order. If a range is specified, only
items that fall within that range will be sorted.
- reverse [range]
- Reverse the order of the song queue. If a range is specified, only items
that fall within that range will be reversed.
- partial-sort regex ...
- For each specified regular expression, the items in the song queue that
match that expression are removed from the queue and gathered into their
own list. All of these lists (plus the list of items that did not match
any regular expression) are then stitched back together through simple
concatenation. Finally, this unified list replaces the contents of the
song queue.
The items that match a particular regular expression will remain in the same
order with respect to each other. Each group of matched items will appear
in the reordered song queue in the order that the corresponding regular
expressions were specified on the command line.
- stagger regex ...
- For each specified regular expression, the items in the song queue that
match that expression are removed from the queue and gathered into their
own list. All of these lists are then merged together in a staggered
fashion. All the leftover items (i.e. the ones that weren't matched by any
regex on the command line) are appended to this unified list, which then
replaces the contents of the song queue.
For example, if you use "moosic stagger red blue green" and the
queue originally contains only names that either contain the string
"red" or "blue" or "green", then the members
of the reordered queue will alternate between "red" items,
"blue" items, and "green" items. If the queue does
contain items that are neither "red" nor "green" nor
"blue", then these will be collected and placed at the end of
the queue, after all the "red", "green", and
"blue" items.
- sub pattern replacement [range]
- Perform a regular expression substitution on all items in the song queue.
More precisely, this searches each queue item for the regular expression
specified by the first argument, and replaces it with the text specified
by the second argument. Any backslash escapes in the replacement text will
be processed, including special character translation (e.g. "\n"
to newline) and backreferences to groups within the match. If a range is
given, then the substitution will only be applied to the items that fall
within the range, instead of all items. Only the first matching occurrence
of the pattern is replaced in each item.
- suball pattern replacement [range]
- This is identical to the "sub" command, except that all
occurrences of the pattern within each queue item are replaced instead of
just the first occurrence.
General management¶
These commands affect the state of the Moosic server in various ways.
- next [number]
- Stops the current song (if any), and jumps ahead to a song that is
currently in the queue. The argument specifies the number of songs to be
skipped, including the currently playing song. Its default value is 1. The
skipped songs are recorded in the history as if they had been played. If
queue advancement is disabled, this command merely stops the current song
and removes the appropriate number of songs from the queue, and does not
cause a new song to be played.
- previous [number]
- Retreats to a previously played song (from the history list) and begins
playing it if queue advancement is enabled. If a number is given as an
argument, then the music daemon will retreat by that number of songs. If
no argument is given, then the music daemon will retreat to the most
recent song in the history. More precisely, this command stops the current
song (without recording it in the song history) and returns the most
recently played song or songs to the queue. This command removes songs
from the history when it returns them to the queue, thus modifying the
song history.
When loop mode is on, this command retreats into the tail end of the queue
instead of the song history. This produces wrap-around behavior that you
would expect from loop mode, and does not modify the song history.
- prev
- An alias for "previous".
- goto regex
- Jumps to the next song in the queue that matches the given regular
expression.
- gobackto regex
- Jumps back to the most recent previous song that matches the given regular
expression.
- noadvance
- Tell the music daemon to stop playing any new songs, but without
interrupting the current song. In other words, this halts queue
advancement.
- noadv
- An alias for "noadvance".
- advance
- Tell the music daemon to resume queue advancement (i.e. play new songs
when the current one is finished). Obviously, this has no effect if queue
advancement hasn't been disabled.
- adv
- An alias for "advance".
- toggle-advance
- Halts queue advancement if it is enabled, and enables advancement if it is
halted.
- stop
- Tell the music daemon to stop playing the current song and stop processing
the song queue. The current song is put back into the song queue and is
not recorded in the song history.
- pause
- Suspend the current song so that it can be resumed at the exact same point
at a later time. Note: this often leaves the sound device locked.
- unpause
- Unpause the current song, if the current song is paused, otherwise do
nothing.
- play
- Tell the music daemon to resume playing. (Use after "stop",
"noadv", or "pause".)
- loop
- Turn loop mode on. When loop mode is on, songs are returned to the end of
the queue when they finish playing instead of being thrown away.
- noloop
- Turn loop mode off.
- toggle-loop
- Turn loop mode on if it is off, and turn it off if it is on.
- reconfigure
- Tell the music daemon to reload its configuration file.
- reconfig
- An alias for "reconfigure".
- showconfig
- Query and print the music daemon's filetype associations.
- start-server [options]
- Start a new instance of the music daemon (also known as moosicd).
If option arguments are given, they will be used as the options for
invoking moosicd. The options that are accepted by moosicd
can be found in its own manual page, moosicd(1).
- exit
- Tell the music daemon to quit.
- quit
- An alias for "exit".
- die
- An alias for "exit".
AUDIO CD SUPPORT¶
If you have the takcd program installed, and you have an appropriate entry for
it in the Moosic server's player configuration, then you can play audio CD
tracks with Moosic. The following entry should be in
~/.moosic/config:
(?i)^cda://(\S*)
takcd \1
To put CD tracks into the song queue, you should name them with the prefix
"
cda://", followed immediately by the number of the track you wish
to play. For example, "moosic -n add
cda://3" will add the third
track on the CD to the end of the song queue.
The takcd program can be found at <
http://bard.sytes.net/takcd/>.
FILES¶
- socket
- This is a socket file which is used to allow Moosic clients to contact the
Moosic server. It is generally located in the ~/.moosic/ directory,
unless moosicd was invoked with the -c/--config
option.
SEE ALSO¶
moosicd(1), for details on invoking the Moosic server by hand.
Various
moosic commands accept regular expressions arguments. The syntax
used for these regular expressions is identical to the syntax used by Python's
regular expression library. The details of this syntax are explained in the
chapter entitled "Regular Expression Syntax"
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/re-syntax.html
<
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/re-syntax.html> from the section
dealing with the
re module in the
Python Library Reference.
AUTHOR¶
Daniel Pearson <daniel@nanoo.org>