MOC - Playing Music in the Terminal

When it comes to console music players, there are pretty decent options out there, and MOC is one of them. Together with applications like mp3blaster or the powerful CMus program, MOC, which stands for Music On Console, uses the Ncurses library, with a text-user interface, support for playlist, shortcuts and more.

MOC has support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and WAV. It also comes with several themes which you can choose from.

What follows is a brief introduction to the shortcuts that you can use with MOC. First, to start MOC type mocp in a terminal:

moc01

Next, you can navigate in the file browser pane to the left to the music directory that you want to add to your playlist. Once the directory is selected, press a to add it. To quit MOC at any type, use Shift+Q. Typing just q will detach the player from the terminal, keeping the process running in the background. To switch between the left and right panel, use TAB

For controlling the volume, you can either press , and . to decrease and respectively increase the volume by 5%, or Shift+, and Shift+. for fine-tuning by 1%. Use left and right arrows to jump back and forward during a song.

moc02

Press h at any time to open the help and get a full list of keyboard shortcuts.

To start MOC using a different theme than the default one, use the -T switch. Themes are located inside the /usr/share/moc/themes directory.

Using the green theme:

green_theme

MOC 2.5.0 Beta 2 has the following default themes bundled:

black_theme darkdot_theme example_theme green_theme moca_theme nightly_theme red_theme transparent-background yellow_red_theme

So, to start MOC using, for example, the transparent-background theme, type in the terminal mocp -T transparent-background.

Using the transparent background theme (for this to work the terminal must have transparency enabled):

transparent

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