cmus: Lightweight elegance

I see now that I have mentioned cmus more times than is fair, without giving it the spotlight it deserves.

2013-07-24-v5-122p-cmus

cmus won points with me years ago when it was able to play back ogg files of moderate bitrate without skipping a beat (pun intended) on old hardware — very old hardware.

For me, that’s still its strongest point. It’s an exceptionally lightweight application (due in fact, I believe, because it is written in C) that is at the same time wonderfully complex.

All the same, I admit openly that I dislike music players that keep databases or manage my music. As I said a long time ago, I manage the music. The player plays it.

So I respect and revere cmus as an excellent example of lightweight and ornate software.

But it’s not my application of choice. My apologies. 😦

12 thoughts on “cmus: Lightweight elegance”

  1. rodney

    You don’t really have to use cmus as a music manager, I have used that feature five times tops and it’s my player of choice. You can press 5 to enter in browser mode, explore your HD and use y and e to add files or whole directories to the playlist and the queue respectively old style. That’s one of the things I like about cmus, it doesn’t make you change your workflow, it adapts to the way you want to use it. Its manpage and cmus-tutorial are gold, I tell you.

    Of course, you should use the application you like, but cmus is bigger than it looks.

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  3. yannanth

    I far prefer Cmus to MPD… apart from being lightweight, the killer app for me is not having to add audio files into the database (as well as not have to run it all the time!).

    I listen to lots of podcasts, so it’s extremely annoying to use MPD for this because you need to get it to index them, and then remove them again when you’re done and MPlayer is just too simplistic. Cmus is a great player that I would highly recommend to anyone!

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