Listen to music in the terminal.

cue is a command-line music player for Linux.

• Search a music library with partial titles
• Creates a playlist based on a matched directory.
• Display album covers as ASCII art or as a normal image.
• Control the player with previous, next and pause.
• Gapless playback.
• Supports 24-bit/192khz audio.
• Supports MPRIS, which is the protocol used on Linux systems for controlling media players.

On Arch Linux, and Arch-based distributions, cue can be found in the AUR. Install with pamac or an AUR helper like yay:

yay cue-git

That's it!

To quickly install cue, just copy and paste this to your terminal (if you have curl installed):

sudo bash -c "curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ravachol/cue/main/install.sh | bash"

Please note that this script might do a system update before installing cue.

cue dependencies are:

• FFmpeg
• FFTW
• Chafa
• FreeImage
• glib2.0 and AVFormat. These should be installed with the others, if not install them.

Install FFmpeg, FFTW, Chafa and FreeImage using your distro's package manager. For instance:

apt install ffmpeg libfftw3-dev git libglib2.0-dev libchafa-dev libfreeimage-dev libavformat-dev

Or:

pacman -Syu ffmpeg fftw git glib2 chafa freeimage

Then run this (either git clone or unzip a release zip into a folder of your choice):

git clone https://github.com/ravachol/cue.git

cd cue

make

sudo make install

A TrueColor capable terminal is recommended, like Konsole, kitty or st, to display colors properly.

For a complete list of capable terminals, see this page: Colors in Terminal (github.com).

First thing to do is to tell cue the path to your music library (you only need to do this once):

cue path "/home/joe/Music/"

Now run cue and provide a partial name of a track or directory:

cue cure great

This command plays all songs from "The Cure Greatest Hits" directory, provided it's in your music library.

cue returns the first directory or file whose name matches the string you provide.

cue (starting cue with no arguments plays all songs (up to 20 000) in your library, shuffled)

cue moonlight son (finds and plays moonlight sonata)

cue moon (finds and plays moonlight sonata)

cue beet (finds and plays all music files under "beethoven" directory)

cue dir <album name> (sometimes it's neccessary to specify it's a directory you want)

cue song <song> (or a song)

cue list <playlist> (or a playlist)

cue shuffle <album name> (shuffles the playlist)

cue artistA:artistB:artistC (plays all three artists, shuffled)

cue --help, -? or -h

cue --version or -v

cue --nocover

cue --noui (completely hides the UI)

cue . (loads the main cue playlist, see 'Other Functions')

• cue has two modes, Normal and Vim. You can change between both with M.

• Use ↑, ↓ keys to raise or lower volume.
• Use ←, → keys to play the previous or next track in the playlist.

• Use l, h keys to raise or lower volume.
• Use j, k keys to play the previous or next track in the playlist.

• Space to toggle pause.
• F1 to show/hide the playlist and information about cue.
• F2 to show/hide key bindings.
• V to toggle the spectrum visualizer.
• C to toggle album covers.
• B to toggle album covers drawn in ascii or as a normal image.
• R to repeat the current song.
• S to shuffle the playlist.
• A add current song to main cue playlist.
• X to save the currently loaded playlist to a m3u file in your music folder.
• Q to quit.

cue will create a config file, .cue.conf, in your home dir. There you can change for instance starting directory and number of bars in the visualizer. To edit this file please make sure you quit cue first.

Licensed under GPL. See LICENSE for more information.