Tutorial to get cmus rockin'

cmus is a console based music player. It's rather feature filled which can mean that getting it set up "just right" might require some work. This post is to help you get cmus set up to rock! There are a few introductory tutorials out there, but they only scratch the surface. My goal is to skip over the very introductory stuff--you've probably already figured that stuff out--and tell you my opinions on how to interact with cmus. I am assuming you've found the :add command, you already know how to play music, and are familiar with the different views (1-7).

Lastly, if you aren't familiar with it, you can set default keybindings and commands to be run in a file like ~/.config/cmus/rc: take a look at the FILES part of man cmus.

Controlling the player

The three main operations you need for a music player are play/pause toggle, next track, previous track. The keybindings for these are c, b, and z, respectively. I can only guess that these are a pneumonic in some language that is not English. Especially b meaning next is bizarre for me. However, you should not use these commands anyway. For these operations, you should not have to browse back to your music player. You should just hit a keybinding wherever you are and your window manager should take care of the rest.

To do this with cmus, we use the cmus-remote which comes with cmus. For play/pause toggle: cmus-remote -u. For next track: cmus-remote -n. For previous track: cmus-remote -r. Note that the previous track command performs correctly without any hacking. If you near the beginning of the track, go back to the previous; if you are past the beginning of the track, go back to the start of this track.

Set up your window manager to recognize a keybinding for each of the cmus-remote commands and forget about c, b, and z.

The playback Modes

Now that we have the basics down, we need to understand the way cmus thinks about your music. There are two sources, or playback Modes: the library and the playlist. This might sound backwards, but this is how you should think of these sources: the library is a dynamic subset of all of your tracks; the playlist is a fixed list of tracks (or files) to be played. You might like to think about library or playlist as the Major Mode. The default keybinding in cmus to switch between these Modes is M. I'll keep using the capital M in Mode in reference to the default keybinding.

You can read about playlists in man cmus. Here's a couple quick tips: if you already have playlists saved to files, you can add the contents of the playlist file with the win-add-p. The default key for this is y. I prefer p for playlist so I have

unbind -f p common
unbind -f p library win-add-p
unbind -f p browser win-add-p

in my rc file. If you have a single folder where all the playlists live, you might want to add this to your rc file:

cd /path/to/playlists/

This way you have access to the playlists right away in the browser (5) view.

Now, let's talk about library Mode. Library Mode has 3 minor modes. I'm using a lower case m here since the default keybinding to switch between the minor modes is m. The minor modes are all, artist, and album. Pretty self explanatory. If you like to listen to one artist or album at a time, then that's all you need to know. Just play what you want in view 1 or 2, make sure you are in library Mode, and then set the minor mode to artist or album as you wish.

If you like to listen to a variety of tracks, most likely with shuffle, you will want the minor mode to be all. You still might not want to listen to literally all of your files. Maybe you have podcasts and music in your library and you only want to listen to music. This is what filters are for. You don't want to do this with playlists because library Mode can be more dynamic and you can take advantage of the library views (1 and 2) while in library Mode. There are a few filters defined by default in the filters view (6). You might add some filters to filter by music or podcast. Maybe: :fset music=filename="/path/to/music/*" and :fset podcast=filename"/path/to/podcasts/*. You are probably now tempted to hit enter on the designated filter on filters view. It doesn't do what you want. How you really do it is you hit space>. [*] indicates the filter will be applied, [!] indicates the filtered tracks will be removed from the library, and [ ] indicates the filter will not be active. Hit space until you have the right setting and then hit enter. Or, for filters you may use often, set some bindings in your rc file:

bind -f common A factivate music
bind -f common P factivate podcast

This is how I think about cmus. The queue is pretty neat, too, but I find I rarely use it.