About a year ago, I stopped using Spotify for my music, instead moving to local audio files. I've never regretted that decision. When I started transitioning to a terminal-based workflow, though, I had to find good utilities to manage and play my collection.
I think that the results have been far more useful than the graphical apps I used to use were.
Acquiring Music
My preferred method of acquiring music is to buy used CDs and rip them. My tastes in music are fairly old, mostly classical, big band, etc., so I can get away with this. I go to Half Price Books and buy up a bunch of clearanced CDs for 50¢ each.
You may decide to pursue a "less legal" solution, but I won't comment on that, except to point out a helpful alias I have set up for yt-dlp, to download audio from YouTube:
alias yt-audio='yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3'
Then I can simply run yt-audio [link to song or playlist] to download a song or album to the current directory.
On to what I do with my CDs. I've settled on abcde. Once again, I've set up an alias to automatically apply settings I want.
alias rip='abcde -Vx -o flac'
-V- Makes the output more verbose, making sure I get all status updates. I like verbose output. :)-x- Ejects the disk onceabcdeis finished.-o flac- Outputs the files in theflacformat
I cd ~/downloads, run rip, and abcde creates a subfolder with all the files, trying to see if it can find information on the album and adding metadata if it does.
Managing the Library
The magic of my music management happens through beets, which bills itself as "the music geek's media organizer". If you're interested in my configuration, I have it posted in my dotfiles. Basically, it sets where I store my music, says to move music files rather than just copying them, and gets album art when importing.
Once I've ripped a bunch of CDs into ~/downloads with abcde, I run beet im . in ~/downloads to import all the albums. It automatically looks for album metadata from MusicBrainz, adds it to the files, then sorts them into your music collection. Mine is set up to be at ~/music.
If you want to learn all of beets's features, it has online documentation available. There are also manpages: man beet for the CLI and man beetsconfig for information on configuring beets.
Playing Music
I play music through cmus. It's pretty self-explanatory; if you don't understand something, see man cmus. You'll probably want to take a look there at first to find all the default keybindings.
One thing you will have to do is add music from your collection. Go to the "Browser" view with 6, use arrows or j and k to highlight the directory you store your music in, then use a to add everything in it to your Library (at which point it will be viewable in the default view; you can get back there with 1). You'll want to do this again whenever you add get new music.
Getting Metadata
I sometimes want to see what's playing without going over to cmus. In SwayWM, my window manager, I can set it to run commands or scripts when a keyboard shortcut is triggered.
I use playerctl to get information about what's currently playing, which has worked for most music players I've tried. Here's my custom notify-playing script:
#! /bin/sh
metadata=$(playerctl metadata)
title=$(echo "$metadata" | grep ":title\b" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=" {2,}"}{ print $3 }')
artist=$(echo "$metadata" | grep ":artist\b" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=" {2,}"}{ print $3 }')
album=$(echo "$metadata" | grep ":album\b" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=" {2,}"}{ print $3 }')
artUrl=$(echo "$metadata" | grep ":artUrl\b" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=" {2,}"}{ print $3 }')
notify-send "$title" "$artist – $album" -i "$artUrl" -t 5000 || notify-send "Nothing playing." -t 5000
Put it in a folder in your $PATH. Now, when notify-playing is run, you get a notification with the title, album, and artist of the song playing.
Bonus: Streaming Music
While it's not strictly for the terminal, I use gonic to stream music to my phone from my collection, since the collection is too large to store full-quality copies on my phone. I won't go into all the details, but it's a streaming backend that works well with beets, so I thought I'd mention it.
Conclusion
This whole workflow won't be perfect for everyone. Still, parts of it can be integrated into whatever your ideal music setup is. Specifically, I think beets is a tool can fit into and improve any setup.
Crafting your music setup is a journey, and it's different for everyone. Once you've figured out the specifics of your setup, do let me know! I'm happy to compare notes and perhaps learn some tips myself.
Happy listening!
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