Two days ago I was looking around to figure out why ogg123 wouldn’t
want to play anymore. The error message said something about ‘oss’ not
being available, or not being found. So, I used apt-cache to search
for things containing oss, and to my joy and happiness, found
PyTone. Here’s the summary from its homepage:

PyTone is a music jukebox written in Python with a curses based
GUI. While providing advanced features like crossfading and multiple
players, special emphasis is put on ease of use, turning PyTone into
an ideal jukebox system for use at parties.

It’s amazing, because I’ve been looking for a text-mode ogg/mp3 player
with crossfading for quite some time, and PyTone has much much
more features than cplay. Of course those features come with a
price: while cplay was slick, stable and easy to use, PyTone gave me
some headache to setup. First, it didn’t want to play any file, then I
tried changing the player settings, to no effect. Then I restored the
settings and magically it started working. Pretty weird stuff. Apart
from that, it is a bit slow for reading the mp3/ogg info from the
files, which I haven’t looked if its possible to disable.

It has a nice way of displaying the library files, pretty similar to
iPod, which is quite impressing.

See the PyTone screenshot to have an idea of how it looks like (it’s the
one at the bottom right), and compare with cplay screenshot (also at the
bottom right). Its a world of difference, isn’t it? I wonder if its
possible to disable some features of PyTone and have it look a bit
less cluttered.

Thats it for today. Have a nice weekend everyone.