Get your holler on!

Recently, there has been a little bit of a buzz out there surrounding the MoC (music on console) audio player. My ramblings here don’t really bring anything new to the table, but I thought that I’d share my ~/.moc/themes/config file with you and share with you how I launch the application.  This is by far my favorite and most frequently used audio player on any of my machines.  MoC is located in the Ubuntu repositories and can be installed easily by typing the following into your terminal emulator:

$ sudo apt-get install moc

Note: everywhere you see “~/path/to/your/music” in this post or in the config file, please change this to the path to your own music directory.

I choose to use Terminator as my main terminal emulator, and that’s where I execute the MoC player from.  In my ~/.moc/themes/config file, I’ve made a couple of comments regarding how to launch MoC.  You can add an alias to your ~/.bashrc file so that MoC knows to look for your specified theme file when you launch it from the console, or you can directly reference your theme config file from your menu launcher.

# ~/.bashrc alias to launch MoC command line music player using desired theme and to launch in main music menu
# alias mocp='mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config'

# Gnome Panel launcher:
# terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config

You’ll notice that I’m calling on “mocp” rather than “moc”.  This is because “mocp” is the actual player application that you need to use — Music On Console Player.

On my Ubuntu machine, I’ve created a custom launcher on the Gnome panel that executes the second command that you see listed above, and when executed, MoCP launches and it uses my specified theme.  I use Ubuntu at work, but most all of my other machines are running either Crunchbang Linux (uses the OpenBox window manager), or a custom Debian build with the PekWM window manager.

OpenBox: To launch MoCp from the ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file, I use the following:

<item label="MoC Media Player">
 <action name="Execute">
 <execute>terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config</execute>
 </action>
</item>

PekWM: To launch MoCp from the ~/.pekwm/menu file, I have specified the following:

Entry = "- MoCp Music Player" { Actions = "terminator -x mocp -m ~/path/to/your/music -T config" }

The ~/.moc/themes/config file will control the colors that appear in your MoC player; mine is located here.  I can’t take credit for writing this whole config file as I know that it originally came from elsewhere, but I unfortunately cannot recall who the original author was.  As I have noted in the config file, you will find a good tutorial on configuring MoCp located here.