mpc123(1)

💖 mpc123(1) — General Commands Manual 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about mpc123 from the General Commands Manual section, because this little icon is about to become your whole personality 🌸

✨ NAME ✨

mpc123 — your handy Musepack audio player 🎧

like, your handy one. yours specifically. it's giving personal assistant but for music.

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

mpc123 [options] file(s)

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so mpc123 is a command-line player for the Musepack audio compression format. it reads mpc audio files and decodes them to the devices you name on the command line. that's it, that's the whole vibe. no cap.

and here's the part that's genuinely iconic: while it's playing, you can skip to the next playlist element by sending SIGINT to the process. which means usually just pressing ^C turns into your personal "next-button" for the player 💅 (and if you used one of the -z or -Z options, see below, "next" means a random one instead — we love a plot twist).

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• --gain N, -g N — sets the gain (that's audio volume, bestie) to N. the range is 0-100 inclusive, the default is 100, and 0 mutes the sound entirely. yes, 0 is the silence button. use it wisely 🙈
• -o driver — sets the output devicetype to driver. possible drivers include:
  • oss — Linux Open Sound System
  • alsa — Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
  • alsa09 — ALSA version 0.9 and newer (ngl you should really be using this one)
  • esd — Enlightenment sound daemon
  • arts — Analog Real Time System (that's the kde sound daemon)
  • null — the debugging output target 🫥
• --audiodevice dev, -a dev — uses dev for audio-out. if you don't specify one, the program tries to pick some sane defaults, based on the audio output driver you're using. common devices include:
  • /dev/dsp or /dev/dsp1 — for oss output
  • default or hw:0 — for alsa09 output
• --au filename.au, -u filename.au — uses the au file filename.au for output
• --cdr filename.cdr, -c filename.cdr — uses the raw file filename.cdr for output (and this one can be used directly with cdrecord's -audio option, which is honestly so satisfying ✨)
• --wav filename.wav, -w filename.wav — uses the wave file filename.wav for output
• --list file, -@ file — uses the playlist file as a list of Musepack files. the playlist format is simple: one file per line. and you can easily generate a playlist for mpc123 with the find(1) command:

find /path/to/musicroot -iname \*.mpc -fprint file

• --random, -Z — plays files randomly until interrupted 🎲
• --shuffle, -z — shuffles the list of files before playing
• --verbose, -v — increases verbosity (the default verbosity is 0), and the more -v you stack, the more verbose mpc123 becomes. stacking flags? we love a build-your-own-adventure
• --quiet, -q — resets verbosity to 0 (no title or boilerplate). this is the default, so it's already chill like that 😌
• --help, -h — prints the help screen, with some brief usage information

💜 AUTHOR 💜

this manual page was written by Daniele Sempione <scrows at oziosi.org>; Fernando Vezzosi <fvezzosi at masobit.net> made some edits. legends, both of them 🫶

that's the whole page, bestie. go forth, play your mpc files, press ^C like a main character, and remember: -o alsa09 is the moment. iykyk 💅

dated January 2006, and this lil page belongs to the mpc123(1) family in the General Commands Manual section — mwah, kiss kiss, slay, periodt 🌈💖✨