TerminalMusicPlayer

A fast and simple music player for the terminal. 'p' to pause, 'n' to go next, 'u' and 'd' for volume up and down, the number keys for 0%, 10% etc and 'q' to quit. Alternatively, media controls for pause, skip and stop work too. Also has discord integration, showing information about the song being played, the current session, the status of the player and song progress. Additionally, it uses ffmpeg to retrieve the mean decibel level of the current song and normalizes around -14dB when calculating the volume level.

TerminalMusicPlayerDemo.mp4

Showcase: song history, progress bar, volume indicator, blue signifies unpaused, red signifies paused.

I made this because it was annoying to have to use a mouse to control my music, however this does have the limitation of being windows and mp3 only.

Dependencies

• Windows.
• MinGW 64-bit → Use any 64-bit distribution of MinGW with llvm/clang support and add [DISTRIBUTION]/bin to your path.
• PowerShell (pwsh.exe) → Run winget install --id Microsoft.Powershell --source winget.
• Make → Run winget install make --source winget.
• ffmpeg → Run winget install --id Gyan.FFmpeg.
• A discord app set up on the developer portal. Add a new application and enable rich presence for it, and make note of the application id.
• A folder anywhere on your computer with mp3 files in it.

Building and Running

To build and run this successfully, create user/client_id.txt and put the application id from the portal in it. After that create user/songs_directory.txt and put the path to your songs folder in it. Then you can build and run the C++ code using the batch files in script/. Optionally, you can supply specific mp3 files from the selected folder as arguments to the program to put them at the top of the play queue. Whenever you change the path to your music folder or change the contents of the current one, you will need to run first with the -r flag to refresh the song list before using it again normally.

Known Issues

• The screen can be made bigger (not smaller) before the song list starts scrolling, but after that any more resizing causes glitchy output.
• Skipping songs too fast in a row will cause the program to crash due to lots of reading and writing of files upon initializing a new song.
• If there are any non-UTF8 characters in the file name (tags are fine), the program will crash when trying to open the song because SDL_mixer can't handle them. You can ensure every file is playable by executing the binary with the flag -c for check which will report any files that contain bad characters.

Updating SDL

On top of the having the previous dependencies installed, go to the releases page and download the file ending mingw.zip. Extract this and go to x86_64-w64-mingw32 and you will have access to three important folders:

• bin which contains the file that can replace the one in binary folder of this project.
• include/SDL2 which contains files that can replace the contents of the external/include/sdl2 folder of this project.
• lib which contains the files (not the folders) to replace the contents of the external/library/sdl2 folder of this project.

Updating TagLib

On top of having the previous dependencies installed, you will need to winget install --id Kitware.CMake. Then follow the steps below to build TagLib:

• Run git clone https://github.com/taglib/taglib.git.
• Run cd taglib.
• Run git submodule update --init.
• Run cmake -B . -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON -DVISIBILITY_HIDDEN=ON -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON -DBUILD_BINDINGS=ON -DWITH_ZLIB=OFF -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G 'MinGW Makefiles'.
• Run cmake --build . --config Release.

After this, you can replace libtag.dll in the binary folder of this project with the one in taglib/taglib. You can also replace libtag.dll.a in the external/library/taglib folder of this project with the one in taglib/taglib. Finally, replace the contents of the external/include/taglib folder with every .h and .tcc file in the taglib/taglib folder and all subfolders.