Last Updated on August 11, 2021
In Operation
There’s the usual repeat, random, shuffle, and single mode playback functionality. Very importantly, as this is an MPD client, there’s gapless playback.
ncmpcpp offers a variety of views. Let’s take a look at some of them.
The first view shows the current playlist (its accessed by pressing the 1 key). The color scheme is awesome, and we prefer the appearance over ncmpc’s default colors.
The playlist view is laid out well, offers an attractive appearance with hyper, a popular terminal emulator. We can edit songs, set the priority of selected items, add items to the playlist, shuffle/sort/reverse range and more.
The next view lets you browse your filesystem. It’s an essential method of accessing a music collection particularly if your music tags are not in perfect order.
Another important view is the media library view.
One of the strengths of ncmpcpp is its search engine, as shown below. There’s support for regular expressions which permits some fairly complex library searches.
We mentioned earlier that your music collection’s tags might not incomplete. Fortunately, there’s a tag editor which lets you amend the tags. It uses the tag library.
There’s also support for fetching lyrics for songs. There’s support for a variety of music fetchers including metrolyrics, musixmatch, genius, lyrics007 and others. It works admirably.
Any console based program cries out for good documentation. The most important aspect is making sure information on keyboard shortcuts is readily to hand. We always like software that makes this information as accessible as possible. And ncmpcpp handles this well, allocating the F1 key to its help screen showing keyboard shortcuts for movement, global keys, and keys that specific to each of the various modes such as playlist, browser, search engine, and the media library.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary