Last Updated on April 28, 2023
The Linux platform has matured into an excellent way of listening to streaming music services. There are clients available for most of the popular music streaming services. But what if you want a single app that covers the very popular ones without straying away from the Linux terminal. Step forward Tizonia.
Tizonia offers access to some excellent streaming music services — all from the command line. The software supports popular services such as YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Chromecast, and more.
Tizonia is innovative software. It doesn’t use FFmpeg, libav, gstreamer or libvlc for playback. Instead, the software’s multimedia framework is based on OpenMAX IL 1.2. OpenMAX (Open Media Acceleration) is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, video, and still images.
Tizonia is C/C++ software which integrates online services with Python connectors/proxies. This means it should be fairly easy to integrate new services, assuming a Python-based API is accessible.
Installation
It’s probably easiest to install Tizonia using a package for your distribution. There’s support for Ubuntu, Debian, Elementary OS, Linux Mint, Raspbian, Arch, and more. If your distribution is not supported, there’s a snap package available. Tizonia can also be run from a Docker container. Or you can compile the source code.
There’s a bit of configuration needed before you can use some of the streaming music services. You’ll need to edit the file $HOME/.config/tizonia/tizonia.conf (the configuration file is located in a different directory if you install Tizonia from the Snap package). Fortunately, the configuration file is well documented, and it’s obvious what information you need to enter for the streaming services, although setting up SoundCloud is a tad convoluted.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Spotify (Premium)
Page 4 – Google Play Music (free and paid)
Page 5 – YouTube
Page 6 – Soundcloud
Page 7 – Other Services and Features
Page 8 – Summary