cmus, a command line music player for those who prefer something light to something pretty

Music players for Linux are not lacking, you just need to search for "player" in this blog to get many results. In Linux we have those of different projects, such as GNOME (Music) or KDE (Elisa), among others, but also those designed for your desktops such as Lollypop for GNOME. Many of them have a good user interface, something that does not have cmus because it works on command line (CLI). Is such a player worth it?

As the song says, it depends. What are we looking for? If we are looking for a nice library with visible covers, cmus is not what we are looking for. If what we want is something with an equalizer, either, but many other players lack one. The thing changes when what we want is only to play our music with something that does not consume resources, in that case we are interested in something like cmus.

cmus works with command line interface

The name cmus comes from C * Music Player. Is light, it does not touch any of our audio files, it has a clean interface and we can control everything with the keyboard. It is a very small package that is available in the official repositories of the different Linux distributions, so its installation is as simple as looking for it in a software store or writing a command that will depend on our package manager.

Once installed, we will launch it in a terminal by typing "cmus" without the quotes. At that time we will enter your browser to add the music. To do this we will navigate to a folder and press the A key to add. And since we have started talking about keys, the rest are:

• V: Stop.
• B: Next track.
• Z: Previous track.
• C: Pause.
• S: Activate random play ("shuffle" in English).
• M: Activate the different random play modes, switching between artists, albums and everything. In English it is the "aaa" mode because "all" is "all". If we have the "Artist" mode set, it will randomly play only that artist's, and so on for albums or the entire library.
• X: Restart track.
• I: Returns to the track and disc of what is playing. That is, if we are moving through the library, the I key will return to playback. It is more or less the same as in others the "Now Playing" view.
• / : Look for. We press the key and start writing. It is instantaneous.
• Minus symbol (-): Reduces volume by 10%.
• Sum symbol (+): Increases the volume by 10%.

It is clear that cmus it is not a player for all audiences, but it is something that is definitely worth it in low-resource equipment. If you are interested, you have more information in the project page.