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Moosic - A musical jukebox program.
Version 1.5.2
By Daniel Pearson

Moosic is a music player that focuses on convenient and powerful playlist management. It consists of a server process that maintains a queue of music files to play and a client program which sends commands to the server. The server continually runs through its playlist, popping items off the top of the list and playing each with an external program. The standard client is a simple command-line utility which allows you to perform powerful operations upon the server's queue, including the addition of whole directory trees, automatic shuffling, and item removal according to regular expressions. The server comes configured to play MP3, Ogg, MIDI, MOD, and WAV files.

REQUIREMENTS: The primary requirement is a Python interpreter that supports version 2.2 of the language (or later) and also includes support for threads. It also relies on the Unix "find" utility. It relies upon external programs for actually playing the music files. The default setup uses mpg123 for MP3, timidity for MIDI, ogg123 for Ogg/Vorbis, mikmod for the whole range of MOD formats, TakCD for audio CDs, and SOX for a wide variety of sound other (mostly uncompressed) sound file formats. Moosic will only work on Unix systems, since it uses a wide variety of Unix-only features. All of these portability issues are noted within the source code.
INSTALLATION: After extracting the archive file (tarball) used to distribute Moosic, change to the directory that contains Moosic, and run "python setup.py install" in a terminal window with the privileges of root (the system administration account).

If you are using the Python installation that is included with Mac OS X, then you should add the "--install-scripts" option to the installation command to choose to install the executable portions of Moosic into a directory that is listed in your PATH environment variable. For instance, "python setyp.py install --install-scripts /usr/bin".

If you cannot or do not want to install Moosic with root privileges, you can install it into your own home directory by running "python setup.py install --home=~" instead. If you install Moosic into your home directory, make sure that the PYTHONPATH environment variable is set and includes the directory ~/lib/python/. Also make sure that your PATH environment variable includes the ~/bin/ directory.

USAGE: "moosic" is the command-line program that provides the main interface to the Moosic jukebox. It works by sending a command to the Moosic server and returning the response, if any. The first non-option argument given to moosic is the name of the command to be performed. Use "moosic --showcommands" to get a list of all the different possible commands, or read moosic's manual page. There are very many commands, so you should start by just learning a few commonly used commands, and only learning others as you feel the need. I recommend starting with the following short command vocabulary: add, list, stop, play, and shuffle.

For example, "moosic add foo.mp3" adds the file foo.mp3 (in the current directory) to the end of the song queue and returns you immediately back to your shell prompt without printing any output (unless an error occurs). Compare with "moosic list", which will list the contents of the song queue. Note that if the song queue is empty, "moosic list" will not display anything.

Any command which takes a list of files as an argument will also accept directories, and doing so will cause every file below that directory to be included in the file-list. Note that the default behavior of moosic is to shuffle everything in a file-list before sending the list to the server, but only after recursively expanding named directories. You can disable shuffling by using the -o option. Use "moosic --help" to learn about all the options for changing the shuffling behavior, as well as the other command options.

When the Moosic server isn't already running, moosic will automatically start it for you (unless you specifically request otherwise with a command-line option). For backwards compatibility, the "moosicd" program can be run to explicitly start the server. However, this usage is obsolete because you can run "moosic startserver" to achieve the same effect. This means that you can delete the "moosicd" program from your system if you want.

This program is free software, and can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See the file named "License.txt" for more details.