topic title: Console/Terminal MP3 Player for antiX
Posts: 1,028
SamK
Joined: 21 Aug 2011
#1
As antiX is lightweight by design in its use of system resources, offering both GUI and equivalent console/terminal apps is a good idea. A non GUI app is often able to offer similar functionality with fewer demands on system resources than a GUI version. This becomes especially important when the useful life of low spec (older) machines is being extended.

For such machines it is reasonably commonplace, and sometimes relatively inexpensive, to increase the capacity of disk storage or RAM (e.g. reusing second-hand parts). It is much less common to replace the CPU and this often becomes the limiting factor on the system.

With the above in mind I have conducted a superficial comparison of the following audio playing apps:
  • GNOME MPlayer - an antiX-M11 player, widely recognized to be an exceptionally lightweight GUI app
    MOCP - the antiX-M11 text based player that runs in a terminal
    MP3Blaster - a text based player that runs in a terminal (from the repo)
The comparison was done using:
  • A re-booted machine running IceWM
    Only the app being monitored was running in addition Htop
    A ROX-Term for Console/Terminal
    Percentages as a relative indicator

Code: Select all

HTOP         GNOME MPlayer     MOCP     MP3Blaster
CPU Total       7-10%          7-9%        3-4%
CPU App         3.0%           3.0%        1-2%
RAM App         2.7%           0.6%        0.3%
The results for GNOME MPlayer v MOCP are quite surprising as they are almost identical. I had expected the non GUI app to use fewer resources than the GUI app.

Comparing the results for MOCP with MP3Blaster indicate the latter uses approximately 50% fewer resources. This will be of greater significance on older, less powerful machines and seems to represent a worthwhile improvement.

This is not to be interpreted as denigrating MOCP which is a good app. It is simply that it uses more resources than mp3blaster to produce a similar result in a similar way.



In case anyone is interested in repeating the experiment the configuration steps for antiX-M11 are as follows:
  • Install mp3blaster from the repo

    I preferred to arrange it so everyone shared the same configuration:
    As root create /usr/share/mp3blaster
    Uncompress the attached mp3blaster.zip in /usr/share/mp3blaster

    Uncompress /usr/share/doc/mp3blaster/commands.txt.gz in /usr/share/doc/mp3blaster

    In your home directory edit .icewm/menu and add the following line in the Terminal Apps - Multimedia subsection:
    prog"MP3 Player" /usr/share/icons/gTangish-2.0a1/32x32/mimetypes/audio-x-generic.png roxterm --hide-menubar --title=MP3Blaster --execute mp3blaster --config-file=/usr/share/mp3blaster/mp3blasterrc
    Note: from prog... to ...mp3blasterrc is on the same line

    Menu-->Desktop-->IceWM-->Update Menu (Auto)

    Menu-->Terminal Apps-->Multimedia--MP3 Player
    I found the best presentation was obtained by a single time configuration of the terminal window
    Right click in the mp3blaster window-->Preferences-->Configuration Manager
    Profile-->Default-->Properties
    Appearance-->Font=Liberation Mono, Style=Bold, Size=11
    Profile-->Default-->Properties
    Colour scheme-->Default-->Properties; Untick"Set text and backgroud colours"

    Close the app and restart it to initialize the new settings
To read the user manual use Shift+?

The application also provides a console/terminal mp3 tagger called mp3tag which I have not tested.
Posts: 1,028
SamK
Joined: 21 Aug 2011
#2
In case anyone might want to have a menu entry for MP3Tag, here's how to do it in IceWM. Add an entry in .icewm/menu in the Multimedia sub-section as follows:

Code: Select all

prog"MP3 Tagger - MP3Tag" /usr/share/icons/gTangish-2.0a1/32x32/mimetypes/text-x-generic.png roxterm --hide-menubar --title=MP3Tag --execute bash -c"mp3tag; echo; echo; bash"
Note: the entire entry is on a single line.

This will open the app in a terminal, display it's help info, then wait for a command to be entered.