Music on Console

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Music On Console

Design by	Damian Pietras
Initial release	2002
Latest release	2.4.3 / 2007-07-30
Preview release	2.5.0 alpha 3 / 2008-02-25
Written in	C
OS	Linux/Unix
Genre	Audio player
License	GPL
Website	http://moc.daper.net

Music On Console (MOC) is an ncurses-based console audio player for Linux/UNIX written by Damian Pietras. It is designed to be powerful and easy to use, and is similar to the Midnight Commander console file manager. It is very configurable, with customizable color schemes, interface layouts, key bindings, tag parsing, and ALSA, OSS or JACK outputs. MOC supports a single playlist (which can be saved in m3u format) and has the concept of a 'music directory' but has no library file where metadata is saved.

Its text-only nature consumes very little system resources, and it uses an output buffer in a separate thread to avoid skipping under high system loads and to enable gapless playback. Normally, exiting the program only closes the interface - the program daemonizes itself so the music continues playing in the background. The background process can be exited by specifing the -x command line switch.

This client/server architecture is similar to MPD, but unlike MPD, the MOC daemon is not accessible over a network, and does not have an open API to communicate with alternate clients. This has both advantages and disadvantages as, while MOC can't be controlled by a remote graphical client (it can, of course, be used via SSH), it can securely range the entire filesystem, which is not advisable by a remotely- and anonymously-accessible server such as MPD.

The binary is named mocp for "MOC Player" because of a conflict with a Qt utility called moc.