I've been using cplay for close to ten years now. It
is a curses front-end to various audio players/decoders, and written
in Python. Sure, I've been
an Amarok fan for half that time,
but when I just want to hear some music I find my self opening a
terminal and starting cplay. I manage my music collection in Amarok, I
grab and listen new podcasts in Amarok. Sometimes I even use it to
play music, but not nearly as much as I do with cplay. I have 4
workstations at home, and they all do the same. Same thing with the
server connected to the best set of speakers. Sure, I have a remote
and Oxine there, but when
I just want to hear some music I don't want to spend 5 minutes messing
with the remote.
Through the years I added various small patches to my copy of
cplay. They accumulated over time, and except for my
color-support
patch I didn't plan on sharing them. But in 2009 I found that the
project page of cplay disappeared. I spent a year thinking it will
pop-up, but it didn't. Then I noticed the Arch Linux package for cplay
pulls the source from the Debian repositories, and realized it's not
coming back.
I decided to publish my copy of cplay, so there exists yet another
place where it's preserved. But as I'm not acting in any official
role, nor do I consider my self a worthy coder to maintain cplay I
decided to fork it and publish under a new name. That also gives me
the excuse to drop anything I don't personally use,
like gettext support. My project is
called play, just play and the Git
repository is now public,
on git.sysphere.org. The
first commit is an import of cplay-1.50pre7
from Ulf Betlehem, so if you're looking for that original
copy you can grab it there.
Beside various bug fixes some of the more interesting new features
are: color support, mplayer
support, curses v5.8 support
and pyid3lib support. Someone on IRC told me this week that
they could never get cplay to work for them on Arch Linux, and they
expressed interest in play. I decided to package it
on AUR, and it's now available
as play-git.