About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and
sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I
love percent and lambda characters. Qubes OS core team member, former OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.
Contact me: solene at dataswamp dot org or
@solene@bsd.network (mastodon).
Today I will share about the console oriented audio player "musikcube" because I really like it. It has many features while being easy to use for a console player. The feature that really sold it to me is the library management and the rating feature allowing me to rate my files and filter by score. The library is nice to browse, it's easy to filter by pattern and the whole UI is easy to use.
Unfortunately it doesn't come with a man page, so you can check the key binding by typing "?" in it or look at the key bindings menu in the main menu.
Musikcube is a console client, meaning you start it in a terminal. You can easily switch between menus with Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and keyboard arrows but you should also check the key bindings for full controls. Note that the mouse is supported!
Once you told musikcube where to look files, you will have access to your library, using numbers from 1 to 6 you can choose how you want the library filtered but 6 will ask which criteria to use, using "directory" will display the file hierarchy which is sometimes nicer to use for badly tagged music files.
You can access to the whole tracks list using "t" and then filter by pattern or sort the list using "Ctrl + s".
When run as musikcube, a daemon mode is started to accept incoming connections on TCP ports 7905 and 7906 for remote API control and transcoding/streaming. This behavior can be disabled in the main menu under the "server setup" choice.
Running it with the binary musikubed binary, there will be no UI started, only a background daemon listening on ports.
Musikcube has a companion app for Android named musikdroid but it only available for download as a file on the github project.
The app has multiples features, it can control the musikcube server for music playing on the remote system, but you can also use it to stream music to your Android device. The song on the musikcube server and android devices can be separated. Even better, songs played on the android devices will be automatically stored for offline (you can tune the cache) and even transcode files to have smaller files for the device.
