In Operation
Issuing the command $ rmup starts up the music player. But the Artist / Album and Track boxes are empty. There’s scant documentation such as a man page. Pressing 0 displays the keybinds, but doesn’t explain how to populate the player with albums. In this situation, you can usually get some sort of help by appending --help to a command.
As you can see, -a lets us add a directory to the library and -l uses a given library file.
We have a small music library with albums under Creative Commons licenses in our ~/Music folder. So let’s restart the program with the command:
$ rmup -a ~/Music
To apply customization, we can edit the program’s YAML config file. This is stored at ~/.config/rmup/config.yaml. The off_panel highlight with red is hard to see in our hyper terminal, but that’s easy to rectify in the config.yaml file. We’ve changed the color to green.
What other features does RMuP offer?
- Playlist support.
- Support for MPRIS media control.
- vim-style command line which can be accessed by pressing
:. - Library is stored in .m3u8 file.
We always consider a music player must have gapless playback. Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. It’s essential if you listen to classical, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock. There’s a few Linux music players that don’t offer gapless playback.
Sadly RMuP falls into the minority camp bereft of gapless playback. That’s a showstopper in our book.
Summary
RMuP is a simple TUI music player but marred by the lack of gapless playback. An issue was raised on the project’s GitLab page. Unfortunately, the developer responded to the issue by saying they don’t have the time to add this feature and flagged it as a low priority issue. That’s a shame.
RMuP uses Symphonia for audio decoding. While there are a few fairly common formats not supported by Symphonia it does support AAC, ADPCM, ALAC, FLAC, MKV, MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, OGG, Vorbis, WAV, and WebM. Our music collection is almost entirely FLAC, with the exception of the CC-licensed test collection which is in MP3 format. And Symphonia can support gapless playback.
We’ll be happy to revisit RMuP and explore it in more detail if gapless playback is ever added. If you’ve got knowledge of Rust, adding the feature might interest you.
Website: gitlab.com/jcheatum/rmup
Support:
Developer: Jadelynn Cheatum
License: Mozilla Public License 2.0
RMuP is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
–Luke– what do you recommend for a text-based music player with gapless playback?
These are my recommendations. All offer gapless playback.
musikcube – written in C++
tap – written in Rust
cmus – written in C
termusic – written in Rust
kew (formally known as cue) – written in C
They are all open source.
I’ve used musikcube before but none of the others. Something to get my teeth (ears) into!
Which one do you use most Luke?
I like all of these 5. For a few years I mostly listened to music from the terminal with musikcube, but tap has won me over.
Still, I listen with Tauon a lot too but that’s GUI.
Good advice, many thanks Luke. I like reading your reviews.