The Substantially Similar Weblog

The New England tourism industry has been hit hard this year by a weak showing of autumn colors. This Japanese Maple in our front yard has finally turned brilliantly red, though:

Get the latest version of randomplay as a tarball (v0.60, released 10/15/06).

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Randomplay is a command-line based shuffle music player that remembers songs between sessions.Randomplay plays your music collection (or execute any arbitrary commands on any arbitrary filetypes) in random order, remembering songs played across sessions. It also has many features to make command-line music playing more convenient, including recursive regexp searching for tracks and the ability to specify a certain number of tracks, bytes, or minutes to play. Randomplay will also generate a list of music files to be loaded onto a portable music player device. It includes a ‘random weighting’ feature, so your favorite songs are more likely to come up in the random shuffle.Randomplay is a convenient tool for the user who does everything in an xterm window or console and is constantly devising complex find/grep/sed command lines to play just the right set of songs.

Following are some example invocations of randomplay to give a general sense of its flexibility; see the manpage for more complete information:

Play all ogg files in dir1 and dir2 under your home directory, and dir3 under the base directory specified in ~/.randomplayrc, which have not been played for 15 days in random order with 5 seconds between songs:

randomplay --days=15 --pause=5 --player ogg=ogg123 ~/dir1 ~/dir2 =dir3

Play all ogg, wav, and mp3 files under the current directory (or base directory, if specified in .randomplayrc file) which have not been played for 10 days in alphabetical order, switch the ‘skip to next song’ keystroke to ‘G’ or ‘g’ and ‘quit’ to ‘q’ or ‘c’:

randomplay --norandom --key next=Gg --key quit=qc

Play all files under the current directory with the strings “frisell” and “bill” in the filename, in any order, (saves having to hunt down a file in a hierarchy), ignore whether the file has been played recently, but stop playing after 15 minutes:

 randomplay --regexp 'frisell bill' -0 --maxtime=15m

Display 100M worth of music files, randomly sorted, without recording the history of tracks, using the default music directory (or the current directory if not specified):

randomplay --maxsize=100M --noremember --names-only

Play the last 10 songs played over again:

randomplay --last=10

Play songs test.ogg, test2.ogg, test3.ogg, and all files in musicdir in random order without weighting preferred songs:

randomplay --noweight test.ogg test2.ogg test3.ogg musicdir

Copy 128M of songs into a Neuros Audio Player, using positron:

positron add `randomplay --names-only --maxsize=128M`

Pick a random jpeg or png file that has not been displayed in the last week from the ‘images’ directory and display it with ImageMagick ‘display’ command:

randomplay --player jpg=display --player gif=display --days 7 ~/images

randomplay is listed on freshmeat.net.

You can download randomplay as a Debian package, or get it directly from the Debian archive.

You can take a look at randomplay, the main script, with nice highlighting, also see the changelog.