MOTIVATION

Minstrel is a minimalist music player with a command line interface born because:

I was tired of the time it took other music players to load their pretty user interface I never looked at
I couldn't find a music player supporting the only feature I care about: occasionally adding a specific song to an otherwise randomly generated queue

FEATURES

Use make. You need the development version of this libraries:

Libnotify is only recommended, you can remove it from the Makefile and everything should keep working (except notifications, of course).

Before you can use minstrel you need to add elements to its library. Use the command:

minstrel index <diractory1> <directory2> ...

to add music to minstrel's library. Minstrel will create its library in ~/.minstrel. If a library already exists it will be cleared first.

Use the command:

minstrel start

To start playing a randomly generated queue. You can move back and forth in the playing queue with:

minstrel prev
minstrel next

Every time you move past the end of the queue a new item will be added to it through random selection. You can stop playing by giving the command:

minstrel stop

And pause (and resume playing) with:

minstrel play

If gnome-settings-daemon is running and you have multimedia keys configured those will work too.

The command:

minstrel search <a query>

will display all the songs in your library that match the given full text query. If you want to add the result of a search to your queue do:

minstrel search <a query> | minstrel add

or:

minstrel search <a query>
minstrel addlast

it's equivalent.

You can also add a song directly with:

minstrel add <song id>

If you don't like to search by full text matching a query you can specify a boolean query with:

minstrel where <query>

the syntax for this last command is that of Sqlite, the fields that you can use are: