MOC, a powerful Console based Music Player

When you are working on low spec machines or really old computers, you always try to avoid using heavy applications. But sometimes even the most necessary ones consume a lot of resources. A few months ago, I was stuck with a really old desktop and had to go for some of the lowest resource consuming applications. MOC, Music on console, was my Music player alternative.

If you always avoid using console based applications, then you have probably never seen the power of ncurses. Ncurses is a great library which empowers a developer to build GUI-like applications in a terminal/console environment. We have already seen one such app before, finch, the terminal based brother of Pidgin, built using ncurses.

Install MOC

If you are an Ubuntu/Debian user, either click this link or just run this command in a terminal to install moc.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install moc

I don't think the package is available in Fedora.

Once installed, run mocp in a terminal to start the player.

On the left side are the directory listings, press "a" to add a song to the playlist, press "A" to add a directory recursively to the playlist. For more such options press "h" for help.

As you can see now, this player provides you with most of the basic features one would expect in a decent GUI based player. So, if you are looking for a light-weight or a console based music player, MOC is your best bet.