Saturday, December 3, 2011

mpg123 and mpg321 in Ubuntu

I have recently been experimenting with Ubuntu quite a bit. The terminal in Ubuntu is just so powerful and there is really an unlimited number of things that you can do. If you have ever tried to get cron to do your dirty work for you, you would have realized that command line apps just work much easier since if you use GUI apps you would have to manipulate the DISPLAY variable in order for cron to be able to handle the application like you want.

For playing back audio, mpg123 and mpg321 are excellent, simple-to-use, apps. They can do all the basic things like open mp3 files, play lists and even urls. One drawback it seems like is that at this time they don't support an extensive number of formats.

One thing that I thought might be of help to someone is that when you create play lists, make sure that the file contains only the file names of the songs separated by line feeds. (Every file name on a new line). Also do not use "" tags around folders or files that contain spaces in the file names. Just type them as they appear.

You can then play the play list using mpg123 -@ playlist

Enjoy,

Hermann

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