Cluck - A TUI Client For XMMS2

Cluck is a TUI (AKA "windowed console", often referred to as "curses-like") client for the XMMS2 music server.

It is written in Scheme, using CDK (an ncurses widget library) for the windowing. It is distributed, however, as pure C (but the C form is autogenerated, and hence totally unreadable), and should be easy to compile. In particular, you do not need CDK to compile the C form; what Cluck uses is included.

The motivation for Cluck was to get the functionality I had been getting from mserv in a system that was getting more active development; as such I've written a page on moving from mserv to xmms2 using cluck.

Features

(copied from FEATURES.html in the source)

• standard song operations (play, pause, stop, next, prev)
• current playlist operations: move songs up and down, add songs, remove songs, shuffle
• song status display, continuously updated
• playlist creation, loading, and deletion
• adding song properties (useful for making your own tags)
• ratings, and automatic changing of ratings based on skipping or selecting songs
• auto-skipping of songs below a certain rating threshold
• easy managing of tags (technically, tag-like properties: any property that is a number and has only ever been set to 0 or 1)
• directory view (which actually looks at the local file system, so cluck and xmms2 should really be running on the same machine). The directory view includes the ability to rename and move files and directories, without breaking their status in xmms2.
• collection creation and deletion
• search (using the same format as More Complicated Collection Queries)
• multiple song add/remove to/from the current playlist
• song deletion
• browsing of collections/playlists
• add/remove whole collection/playlist from the current playlist (this allows, for example, having an "Offensive" collection that you can subtract from your playlist when you're at work)
• configurable list of columns to show in song views, also configurable column order
• editing of song properties
• writing of song properties back to the id3/vorbis tags in the file

Screenshots

• Main View
• Main - No Help Tab
• Playlist View
• Filter - Query Entry
• Filter - Results
• File Mode
• Selecting A Song Rating
• Selection Song Tags
• Editing Properties
• Adding A Property
• Column Selection
• Sorting

Download

You almost certainly want to get the C version. As of 27 Nov 2008, the version is 1.02

Cluck is actually written in Chicken Scheme, which is a LISP type language. If for some reason you really want to, you can download the actual Chicken source, but please be aware I'm not going to support it.

Requirements

• Linux, preferrably Debian. I have no idea how well Chicken compiled to Scheme will run on machines different from my own; I've had only one tester so far.
• You need xmms2d from the DrKosmo revision, or a current snapshot if DrKosmo isn't out yet (which, as of this writing (25 Sep 2007) it is not). I apologize for this requirement, but it wasn't possible to do file renaming or moving without it, and that feature is a lot of the reason I wrote the client in the first place. I found the process of installing the latest snapshot pretty easy; just make sure you have all other versions removed first. See http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Download_XMMS2#Source
• PCRE (in the form of libpcre.so.3 OSLT)
• XMMS2 client lib (in the form of libxmmsclient.so.2 OSLT)
• Curses (in the form of libncurses.so.5 OSLT)
• If you want to edit song information *and* you want that information written back to the song file, you'll need the programs "id3v2" (for mp3 files) and "vorbiscomment" (for Ogg Vorbis files) in your path. You'll also need write permissions on the files and the directories they are in, and the file names need to end in .mp3 or .ogg as appropriate.

Help/Support

Please feel free to e-mail me at rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org