3 command-line music players for Linux

cmus is a fast and flexible music player. It organizes your music by either musician or album title, and lets you load playlist files. You can also use cmus’ built-in search function to look for music in your /home directory and you can switch between several different layouts.

MOC (short for Music on Console) is a dual-pane music player that’s similar to cmus. The left pane lists the tracks in a folder, while the right pane contains the contents of a playlist file (if there is one in the folder).

If you want a quick and dirty way to play music files, then mpg123 and ogg123 are good options. I’ve lumped them together because both applications are very similar. In fact, the only difference between the two applications is the file formats they support.

ripit isn’t a music player, but it can help you feed your music player. It’s a script that works with a number of utilities and audio encoders—like cdparanoia, cdda2wav, Ogg Vobis, and LAME—to convert the tracks on a CD to files on your hard drive.