msk_music

by Michael Skyba
(Initially written on 2021-07-23)

I have decided to put this to use for sharing scripts I write, in hopes that one or two of them could be of use to somebody.

msk_music GitHub Gist

msk_music is a simple and featureless way of listening to music. It uses the equivalent of “random” and “consume” modes on mpd (which it aims to replace). For my use cases, which I believe are fairly standard, it does so successfully.

Instead of having a vast number of configuration options, additional features can be implemented by changing the source code, which, due to being written in shell, is completely transparent. For instance, this patch will have msk_music only run on .mp4 files.

msk_music depends on mpv and a set of coreutils that support sed’s “-i” flag. msk_music is around 20 LOC, and was written in about 10 minutes.

2022-08-06: Rambling

So, it uses local files?

Yes. You could modify it to create the track list from a user-generated track list that contains web URLs, but that would be weird.

Playing music locally instead of through a streaming service offers a few advantages:

• You can listen to your music even when you’re offline.
• You can listen to music without the use of online streaming platforms, which often have required payments, advertisements, bloated, slow, resource-hogging user interfaces, etc.
• You can listen to the same music in any client that you like, of which there are many on Linux.
• Since it’s your filesystem, you can perform your own automation for organization, renaming, etc.

I don’t care how you listen to your music or if you listen to music at all; I’m just explaining my motivation for using this system instead of e.g. Spotify.

But how am I supposed to get the local audio?

This is only a problem if you lack basic digital literacy, in which case you definitely wouldn’t be interested in some random shell script on the internet. That said, I usually save any new music I like to a YouTube playlist and then download the playlist with yt-dlp once it starts filling up. I don’t understand why people bother with torrenting when this seems so much easier.