Mp3 2.0
Optical has recommended mpd to me for a long time. I have been using bmp (i call it the gtk2 version of that old-fashioned xmms). Not 'good enough' but ok to live with. Time to try new (exciting) stuff.
The process is quite easy. Just install the mpd server and one of clients you like. My choice is gmpc and the command line tool mpc. To live in a 'mp3 2.0' century, you'd better install mutagen since the mid3iconv utility can help out you 'mp3 1.0 refugees'.
Do some config, create the database, start the daemon and run the client. Now you have a simple but clean interface. You can use mpc to add new songs to the db:
$ mpc update path/to/song.mp3 (path is relative to your music_directory)
And btw, mpd's default config file is ~/.mpdconf, NOT ~/.mpd.conf. Be careful.
Now that with mpd installed, we really can have more fun:
Show what you are playing on conky:
Just edit ~/.conkyrc to add some mpd_* variables. To correctly show Chinese chars, make sure conky runs in the UTF-8 environment and specify in ~/.conkyrc your favorite chinese fonts to show the title/artist. Here's a screenshot.Announce your playing song and stats in xchat:
Install MPD.pm and this mpd-info script.Show music status in your gaim:
gtalk-testing now has a new feature called music status. I just wrote a simple gaim plugin to do the similar thing:
$ git clone http://linuxfire.com.cn/~alecs/repo/musicstatus
You can view it via gitweb. It's actually quite trivial.
