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why this NOW?

some songs on loop help me relax.

when i switched to arch, listening from the web->yt/spotify felt good but i wanted shit done from my terminal(following the vocal tribe of linux) and also if u need a gui to do something, something is wrong. So i installed mpd(music player daemon) and ncmpc(Ncurses Music Player Client).

The feeling was good, oddly satisfying, i got what i wanted, until while browsing r/unixporn, i saw a riced setup - having rmpc(Rusty Music Player Client), 100% in rust -----------------------My seismic juices erupted just know that ncmpc is not customizable(u can just change the bg and fg colors)…but this thing, it had everything, album art + visual channels + cava integration + playlist + queue + external command support the thing was customizable to granularity. // ps i knew ncmpcpp, just that the mood swings didnt happen for it.

So i spent the last 2 days going through the docs and setting it up - tried making a few themes(basically copying things from other people)..

reproduce it!

u need mpd as a necessity cuz how else will any music player work? and configure it accordingly as u seem fit…port or socket is a choice u make(i prefer sockets)

Terminal window
sudo pacman -Syu mpd && mkdir -p ~/.config/mpd && touch ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf

setting up mpd…is easy af (watch a tut or just copy the default.conf and edit accordingly)

or just copy mine config which is socket based

link to my mpd config

now we just run the mpd.service for the current user(can do system-wide too but user wide is a lot cleaner for all this (again a personal preference it is))

Terminal window
systemctl --user enable --now mpd

now lets install our white knight - rmpc along with cava(cuz who doesnt like the audio bars) and also picard which is an audio tagger tool, useful in finding the details + album art for any song ---- try to integrate them in ur custom config.

Terminal window
sudo pacman -S rmpc cava picard && mkdir -p ~/.config/rmpc

for info about custom config head to rmpc site or copy the rmpc folder from my dotifles and place them in ~/.config/rmpc/ inorder to change the theme just replace the theme name in config.ron file; u can modify the bindings in the same file too

The bindings are very similar to vim, open the helper with ? to see the bindings ; i copied a good chunk of config from the rmpc’s creator and modified them a little -

  • Y for searching in YT about the current song being played.
  • P for searching in picard about the current song and updating its details. also a notif on song change and all that.

now just go to the /scripts folder and give execute permission for picard and yt-search bash script to work.

Terminal window
chmod +x scripts/*

Everything is sorted now u just need to install high quality music (flac or aiff) and just enjoy…i am using alacritty for which the album art is ansii generated > would work perfectly with kitty or any terminal with graphics support

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