We often review software that’s in an alpha stage of development. Some projects fizzle out without ever reaching a mature release. Others grow into mighty oaks. That’s the nature of open source.
Cue is a command line music player written in the C programming language. It’s free and open source software.
Cue recently saw its 1.0 release. If a project is following semantic versioning, version 1.0 should signify the release is ready for production. But version numbers are often meaningless, as there are no rigid rules in place regarding numbering releases. It’s really like the Wild West — anything goes.
Installation
Cue needs FFmpeg, FFTW, Chafa, FreeImage, glib2.0 and AVFormat. This software is already installed on our test machine which is running Manjaro, an Arch-based distro. But you’ll need to install this software if it’s not already present on your system.
There’s a package for Cue in the Arch User Repository (for Arch and Arch-based distros) but a manual installation is so simple.
Clone the project’s GitHub repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/ravachol/cue.git
Change into the newly created directory:
$ cd cue
Compile the source code.
$ make -j 6
$ sudo make install
The make install command copies a single file, the cue executable, to /usr/local/bin
As a once-only operation, you need to tell cue where your music directory is stored. For example, if your music is stored in the directory /home/luke/Music, use the command:
$ cue path "/home/luke/Music"
This command creates a configuration file .cue.conf in your home directory. This is a plain-text file, so you can change the Music path by editing the first line of that file, or just re-run the cue path command with an alternative path:
[luke@linuxlinks ~]$ more .cue.conf path=/home/luke/Music coverEnabled=1 coverAnsi=0 visualizerEnabled=0 visualizerHeight=8
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary