musicd - the music daemon

musicd is a daemon for playing music, intended to serve as a replacement for GUI music players.

The core idea of musicd is simple: you give it a file which is a queue of music to play, and musicd plays them, one after the other, in the background. Each line in your playlist file specifies one or more files to play, either directly by filename, or using any of musicd's several specification options.

Each line can specify one of the following:

• A file to play.
• A glob pattern of files to play.
• A folder from which to randomly choose a given number of files to play.
• A folder to play files from indefinitely.
• A YouTube search term.
• Another playlist file to include.

To play music, open your playlist in your favorite editor and queue up what you want to play. musicd works best if you have your music arranged in a filesystem hierarchy which matches how you want to organize your music.

Dependencies

musicd depends on sox in order to play music, and youtube-dl if you want to use it to play music from youtube (an optional feature). You can install them both with apt:

# apt install sox youtube-dl

or dnf:

# dnf install sox youtube-dl

On Ubuntu you may also need to install libsox-fmt-mp3 in order to be able to play mp3 files.

In order to compile musicd you'll need to install stack. You can do that with:

$ curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh

Installing

Clone this repo, then run

$ stack setup
$ stack install

If you already have the appropriate GHC version set up with stack you can skip the stack setup step.

Running musicd

Run

$ musicd

in order to spawn an instance of musicd. It will automatically detach itself from your season and run as a daemon. (You can use the --foreground or -f flag to run it in the foreground instead.)

A full list of options is available with musicd --help. The most important one is --root, with is the path to the root of where you keep your music. It defaults to $HOME/Music. musicd also takes a --playlist flag, which is a path to where it will look for a playlist relative to the music root, defaulting to ./playlist.

Playlist format

Each line can be one of the following:

• A file path (relative to the root) indicates a song to play.
• A ?, followed by a path to a directory (again, relative to the root), indicates a folder to play a random song from.
• A ?, followed by a number, then another ? and then a path to a directory, indicating a number of random songs to play from that directory.
• ??, followed by a directory, from which musicd will play random songs indefinitely.
• A =, followed by a glob pattern, which will be expanded by musicd into a list of songs to play.
• A @, followed by a youtube search term. musicd will play the top result for that search term from youtube. This functionality is still somewhat new, and will be refined more in the future.
• A -, followed by a path to another playlist file, whose contents will be inserted in place of the line.
• An empty line, at which musicd will pause. This will last until the file is edited and the empty line removed or replaced.

Usage

musicd is flexible, and doesn't demand that you use it with any particular workflow. That said, my personal workflow—which musicd was designed around—goes something like this:

• A keybinding in my window manager, which pops up a terminal window in which the playlist file is open in (neo)vim.
• Completion in vim with deoplete, which does (among other things) filename autocompletion, including fuzzy matching.
• A simple (one-level) music directory layout, which has a subdirectory for each group of music arranged roughly by what I might want to play together.

All this means that I can quickly open my playlist and easily queue up music, including using musicd features such as = and ? in order to select some or all music of a particular type or genre, or by a particular singer or artist (depending on how exactly I choose to arrange the files.)

Play/pause

musicd doesn't have it's own play/pause feature, because it doesn't need to. Instead, you can rely on Unix's built-in play/pause support, via the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals.

Send a SIGSTOP to musicd's child sox process (via e.g. pkill -s stop play) and it will pause. Send a SIGCONT (e.g. pkill -s cont play) and the music will resume.

My preferred way of managing this is to bind a keybinding my window manager to send the appropriate signal to toggle the current song between playing and being paused. Similarly, I also have another keybinding set up to send a SIGTERM to the sox subprocess, which I can use to skip the current track.

Limitations

For obvious reasons, musicd can't play files whose names begin with one of the symbols that it uses as part of the playlist format (such as ? or @), or that have a newline in them. If you would like to play such a file with musicd you can rename it, or create a symlink to alias that file to a playable name.