Play Songs From Terminal🎵

Online music players are totally bloated with ads, Its time to find an alternative

Why?

I asked the same question myself, I had my reasons let us go through them

• It looks cool on the internet
• Reduces load on CPU caused by external media players
• No ADS!!

How?

For this you need two applications mpv and youtube-dl, mpv is used to play videos and songs, youtube-dl is used to download youtube audio and video.

Installation

# MacOS
$ brew install youtube-dl mpv
# Linux
$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl mpv

A Code Snippet from carbon

Usage

To get this to work it is simple create a folder to store your songs and cd into that directory. Go on to youtube and get the link for video song you want.

$ youtube-dl "<link>" -o "<output>"

If you only need the song not the video:

$ youtube-dl -F "<link>"

It give all the formats of the download that is possible, chose the id of the format that you need (Generally 140 .m4a works).

$ youtube-dl -f 140 "<link>" -o "<output.m4a>"

Now that the songs are downloaded we need to start playing them.

$ mpv <song>.m4a

If you want all the songs to play, use piping in terminal

$ ls | grep ".m4a" | xargs -r mpv

This will eliminate the need for other media players and remove the dependence on music websites. If you wish you can put this in a function and just call the function whenever you need directly from the terminal.

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