Nicolás Brailovsky

mocp rand

Posted by: nico on date

Jul 23rd, 2009 | filed

Filed under: Console, Programming

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I’m quite sure everyone reading this must have a respectable, if not massive, music collection. In this days and age is difficult finding someone who doesn’t. It’s also difficult to choose one, and only one, disk to listen at any given moment. Until we’re upgraded to support concurrent music listening we’re better of with a random disk selector, which is exactly what this little script does:

#!/bin/bash
SEARCH_DIR=‘/home/nico/Música’
START_RANDOM=1
RAND_MAX=32767
while (( 1 )); do
NUM_DISCS=$(find $SEARCH_DIR -type d|wc -l)
RAND=$(($NUM_DISCS * $RANDOM / $RAND_MAX))
RAND_DISC=$(find $SEARCH_DIR -type d | head -n $RAND | tail -n 1)
# Wake up moc
mocp -FS 2>/dev/null >/dev/null &
mocp -pca "$RAND_DISC" &
echo "Playing $RAND_DISC"
# Start from a random file?
if (( $START_RANDOM )); then
mocp –on shuffle &
mocp -f &
mocp –off shuffle &
fi
read
done

Of course, it requires mocp, my favorite music (on console) player. And obviously, you’ll have to configure SEARCH_DIR but I’m sure some bash hacking is not that hard.
Beware though, using this + cron may have the undesired effect of awakening to the pleasant music of Cannibal Corpse.