Streaming from the command line

Shashank Sharma won’t ever stop singing the praises of the command line, and applications like Musikcube, are the reason why.

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Holidays are the time to get together with friends and family and share stories over some good food. It’s an undeniable fact that such get-togethers are even better when complimented with music – major brownie points if you’ve got a streaming system in place. But if you want geek creds, you’ve got to be able to do all that from the command line.

Musikcube is a cross-platform music player. The native streaming ability sets Musikcube apart from other popular command-line music players such as Cmus. Although it isn’t available in the software repositories of many popular desktop distributions, the BSD-licensed project provides 64-bit binaries for the more-recent releases of Fedora and Ubuntu.

Unlike most other command-line utilities, Musikcube does have quite a few dependencies, but thankfully most of these are offered in the software repositories of most distributions. After downloading the pre-packaged binaries for your distribution, you can use the native package management utility to install Musikcube, and it will inform you of any missing dependencies. The project’s wiki on GitHub has a list of distribution-specific dependencies and instructions on installing Musikcube from source.

Using the player

The hardest part of working with Musikcube is getting its spelling right. Thankfully, the auto-complete feature on Bash means you will never encounter this difficulty. Besides, you can also create an alias to circumvent the curious spelling.

When you launch Musikcube, it drops you into the Settings view. The interface is split into three different panes. The pane at the bottom lists a number of configurable options that define the app’s behaviour. For instance, you can configure