cmus (C* Music Player) is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems.

cmus (C* Music Player) is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and operates exclusively through a text-based user interface, built with ncurses.

The text-only design reduces the resources needed to run the program, making it a strong choice for older or less-powerful computers as well as systems where a graphical environment (such as the X Window System) is not available.


cmus was originally written by Timo Hirvonen. At around June 2008 he discontinued development of cmus, which resulted in a fork named "cmus-unofficial" in November 2008. After a year of development, a take over request was sent to SourceForge, which was granted after a 90 day period without response from the original author. [1] This resulted in a merge of the fork back into the official project in February 2010.

cmus' interface is centered around views. There are two views on the music library (an artist/album tree and a flat sortable list) and views on playlists, the current play queue, the file system and for filters/settings. There is always only one view visible at any time.

Owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard. Commands are loosely modeled after those of the vi text editor. General operation mimics being in command-mode of vi, where complex commands are issued by prepending them with a colon, (e.g. ":add /home/user/music-dir"), simpler, more common commands are bound to individual keys, such as "j/k" moving down/up, or "x" starting playback, and searches beginning with "/" as in "/the beatles".

Features:
Support for many audio formats, including: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, Wav, MPEG-4/AAC, ALAC, WMA, APE, TTA, SHN and MOD
Instant startup, even with thousands of tracks
Gapless playback
ReplayGain support
MP3 and Ogg streaming (SHOUTcast/Icecast)
Powerful music library filters / live filtering
Play queue
Excellent compilations handling
Customizable colors and dynamic keybindings
Vi style search and command mode
Remote controllable through cmus-remote program (UNIX socket or TCP/IP)
Known to work on many Unix-like systems, including Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Cygwin

Plugins.
Input: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, WAV, AAC, MP4, and everything supported by ffmpeg (WMA, APE, MKA, TTA, SHN, ...) and libmodplug
Output: PulseAudio, ALSA, OSS, RoarAudio, libao, aRts, Sun, and WaveOut (Windows)

Playing.
Gapless playback
ReplayGain support
MP3 and Ogg streaming (SHOUTcast/Icecast)
Play queue
Optional playback resume on startup

Interface.
Instant startup, even with thousands of tracks
Powerful playlist filters / live filtering
Easy to use directory browser
Customizable colors
Dynamic keybindings. You can bind a key to any command, :seek +1m for example
Vi / less style search mode
Vi style command mode with tab completion

Misc.
Excellent compilations handling
Uses Unicode internally for all string handling
Supports audio scrobbling (to e.g. Last.fm or Libre.fm) etc. via status display programs
Can run external commands for the currently selected files (tag-editor for example)
Can be controlled via UNIX socket using cmus-remote command
Known to work on Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Cygwin

Download.

Stable Releases.

• cmus-v2.4.3.tar.bz2, released 30.11.2011
  Compared to 2.3.x series, this release features tons of improvements, with most notable ones being live library/playlist filtering and playback resume support — please see the full release notes here.
• cmus-v2.3.5.tar.bz2, released 10.04.2011
  Among other things, this release (compared to 2.2.0) features gapless MP3 playback, native PulseAudio support, faster startup, and much improved compilations handling.
• cmus-v2.2.0.tar.bz2, released 27.07.2007
  When trees were tall, and grass was green...

More information on older releases can be found on cmus' freshmeat page.

Bleeding Edge

If you want to help cmus development and be among the first to try the latest and greatest features, use the pu (proposed updates) branch, e.g.:

git clone -b pu git://gitorious.org/cmus/cmus.git
cd cmus
./configure prefix=$HOME/cmus
make install

You may want to add the installation directory to your PATH, e.g.:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/cmus/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc ; . ~/.bashrc

Since the branch is recreated, you need to use this command to update the source tree (instead of git pull):

git remote update && git reset --hard origin/pu

Installation. In case your favourite package manager provides an up to date version of cmus (see list of cmus packages), installation is straightforward, e.g.:

Install cmus on Ubuntu:

Open the terminal and run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jmuc/cmus

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cmus

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