Listening music on command line Lubuntu

Who says you can't listening music from the command line? there are many things you can do while you are on the command line mode, that's include playback audio files (mp3, flac, wma, ogg. etc).

I'm not kidding, you can listen to the music while you are inside the command line of lubuntu/ubuntu, there is a program called 'cmus' (stand for C-music player), which allows you to playback various audio files on the command line.

So basically 'cmus' is a text based (command line based) music player available on lubuntu/ubuntu repository. To install 'cmus' on lubuntu, simply run this command:

sudo apt-get install cmus

To run 'cmus', simply type 'cmus' on the command line.

cmus

And you might want to take a look at the manual first, because you need to know all the command inside cmus, before you can use it to playback music.

man cmus

How to add song to cmus?

To add song, you need to type ':add' followed by the name of the music file, along with the absolute path, here's an example:

I have mp3 files inside my home folder, so here's what i do on 'cmus':

:add /home/kernelpanic/music/song1.mp3

Tips:
you can use the 'TAB' button on your keyboard, while entering the location of the music file, so you don't need to type the whole path, let the auto complete do the job.

How to play music on cmus?
Once the music file is loaded, you can just hit 'ENTER' and the music will start to play, or you can also press 'x' button on your keyboard. On the playlist, you can use the keyboard up and down to highlight the song.

You can pause the music by pressing 'c' button on your keyboard, to stop a music press 'v' button on your keyboard, for more list of command on cmus, you can take a look at the manual page.

How to exit/close cmus?

To exit from 'cmus', simply press ':q', or ':quit'

:q

:quit