mplayer and alsaplayer: A text-only twofer

I’m going to throw two together this time, mostly because they both handle audio files without any graphical interface.

But also because neither one has much of any interface at all.

mplayer, like vlc, has a text-only version, and will handle audio files. The standard controls for video playback seem to work for cli audio too, which is good.

alsaplayer is similar; this again is an application that is designed to run primarily in a graphic environment, but can do much of the same work with the -i text flags.

Controls for alsaplayer are a little more obscure. There are keypresses for the GTK version, but they don’t seem to have an effect on a running instance at the command line.

In a pinch, either of these could suffice as an audio player in a text-only form. But I almost never use them.

Not that there’s anything wrong, it’s just that there are better options available, that’s all. 😐

8 thoughts on “mplayer and alsaplayer: A text-only twofer”

yannanth 2013/07/29 at 6:30 am

Wow, what is the picture in the background from? Some of the best pixel art I have ever seen without a doubt. 😮

K.Mandla Post author2013/07/29 at 6:34 am

The inimitable Juan Manuel Daporta.

http://daporta.deviantart.com/ 😉

Elena ``of Valhalla'' 2013/07/30 at 2:54 am

A running instance of alsaplayer can be controlled by running the alsaplayer command with appropriate options in another shell. E.g. “alsaplayer –relative 60“ will move 60 seconds forward in the file being played, “alsaplayer -e $FILE“ will add a file to the playlist, etc.

This is great if you want to control the music while having something else on the screen; I have setup a few key combinations in my window manager for common commands (pause, movement in the file), but the versatility doesn’t end here: since they are all non-blocking commands one could setup e.g. a voip application to pause the music when the phone is ringing (and resume it at the end of the call), or run it on a raspberry-like board with GPIOs and control the music with various ambient sensor.