mjs: Getting better as time goes on

Almost four years ago, I tinkered with an already ancient mp3 player called mjs.

It astounds me that mjs is still around, and still works — in fact, better for me this time than four years ago.

Screenshots here were a little cumbersome, only because of my hardware.

mjs displays strangely in rxvt-unicode (as in, a complete blank screen), a problem I can (more or less) circumvent by feeding “xterm” into $TERM.

On the other hand, fbgrab is feeding me garbled images from the framebuffer of this machine.

Regardless, mjs managed to send out the appropriate audio sensation to my ears, and without much prodding.

I should mention that the help pages inside the tarball suggest mjs was intended to run on very ancient hardware — Cyrix and 75Mhz Pentium I machines.

Which is good. In the “bad” column, it really only handles mp3 files. You can feed ogg123 into the configuration file, but you won’t be able to select them from inside mjs.

So it’s a tradeoff — technically only one file type, but software so light it’ll sit pretty on a high-end 486 … if the docs are to be believed.

Try it and tell me, wouldya? In the mean time, I’m going to wait four more years and see if things improve again. 😉