Workbench

A hacked-together Python command-line Audio Player

The other day it occurred to me to see if there were any good terminal-based audio players since the last time I looked.

There weren't, at least not in the goldilocks zone that I have in mind, which is a little more than mplayer and a lot less than cmus. All I want is a terminal command that takes some audio filenames and plays them with a nice TUI and basic start/pause/stop/skip controls.

While poking around today I found the Python audioplayer library, and it didn't take much to get a script working that will:

  1. Load audio files from a directory
  2. Play them in order, using tqdm to show a progress bar as they go.
from audioplayer import AudioPlayer
import os
from time import time
from tqdm import tqdm
ALBUM = './Optiganally Yours/O.Y. In Hi-Fi'
for f in sorted(os.listdir(ALBUM)):
    if f[-4:] == 'flac':
        p = AudioPlayer(f"{ALBUM}/{f}")
        # (There might be a way to make the player load the file without
		#  the play/pause step, but I haven't dug too deeply)
        p.play()
        p.pause()
        dur = round(p._player.duration())
        started_at = time()
        tick = started_at
        p.play()
        pbar.update(1)
        is_playing = True
        with tqdm(total=dur, desc=f.rjust(25, ' ')) as pbar:
            while round(p._player.currentTime()) <= dur and is_playing:
                now = time()
                if now - tick >= 1:
                    pbar.update(1)
                    tick = now
                if tick - started_at >= dur:
                    is_playing = False
        p.stop()
        p.close()
        pbar.close()
An album playing in a Python REPL

I also discovered blessed, which could be used to build an actual interface.

Prerequisites

You'll need gstreamer installed on your system, and the following Python packages:

  • audioplayer
  • tqdm

I ran this right from a REPL, but it ought to work as a script.

Tue Jul 09 2024 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)