consolecandy: Worth the effort?

“Effort” is a relative term here, since the screenshots I have for you of consolecandy were assembled on the fly, in a live Linux Mint environment, and really only required a few minutes of my life.

    

And they’re considerably attractive. I’m not sure why I passed this over so abruptly a year ago.

I’d like to get it working in Arch, and just use it as a static background toy, but I think libmpeg3 is only available through AUR, and that package explodes every time I try to compile it. 😦

In Debian (or more specifically, Mint) though, I only needed build-essential, libmpeg3-dev, libfftw3-dev and libncurses5-dev. Yep, if I remember right, that was all. Decompress the consolecandy tarball, and enter make from the source directory.

You should be left with an executable that not only plays a song, but keeps your eyes entertained. The beauty of a precompiled distro. 😉

I tried this on my high-end machine — a dual-core Thinkpad with gobs of memory and plenty of processor power. It seemed a little slow on the display, where I could sense a lag between pulses in the music and spikes in the output. I was not expecting that, but it may have been an anomaly.

And compared to some other music players for the console, you might find consolecandy a bit slender. By default, it has no title display, no progress indicator, no real playlist support. … The command-line flags give you some control over the particular display or the time delay between changes, but not much more than that.

Of course, we have seen other music players in the past that were similarly tight-lipped, so maybe it’s not such a big deal.

On the other hand, there are only a few console music players out there that take the time to give you a proper visual element — I can think of only Open Cubic Player and ncmpcpp (which I promised to look at again) offhand. So consolecandy didn’t have to work hard to get into the top three. 🙄

If all you want out of your music player is music, and perhaps something splashy to drive other geeks nutty, consolecandy is a great bet. If you need precise information and explicit control over playback, I’d recommend something else.

Hey, it’s your computer; what are you asking me for?!