ansaurus

Question

how to play .mp3 songs randomly by searching for them recursively in a directory and its sub directories?

Answer 1

+1 A:

Backticks.

mpg123 -Z `find /media -name \*.mp3`

Though if you have a lot of files, you may encounter command line length limitations.

laalto 2009-06-26 07:23:30

The o/p gives 'find /media -name \*.mp3:No such file or directory'.

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 08:01:06

Answer 2

+4 A:

mpg123 -Z $(find -name "*.mp3")

The $(...) means execute the command and paste the output here.

Also, to bypass the command-line length limit laalto mentioned, try:

~~mpg123 -Z $(find -name "*.mp3" | sort --random-sort| head -n 100)~~

EDIT: Sorry, try:

find -name "*.mp3" | sort --random-sort| head -n 100|xargs -d '\n' mpg123

That should cope with the spaces correctly, presuming you don't have filenames with embedded newlines.

It will semi-randomly permute your list of MP3s, then pick the first 100 of the random list, then pass those to mpg123.

Matthew Flaschen 2009-06-26 07:24:04

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 08:03:18

The following command worked:find /media -name "*.mp3" | xargs -d '\n' -n10 mpg123 -Z.By '-n' option we can provide no. of arguments for a single invocation of command

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 09:44:24

Thanks Mathew for the help !

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 10:12:12

Answer 3

+1 A:

Would something like this work?

find /media -name *.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 mpg123 -Z

Seh Hui 'Felix' Leong 2009-06-26 07:30:04

Answer 4

+1 A:

The following works fine.

find /media -name "*.mp3" | xargs -d '\n' -n10 mpg123 -Z.

By '-n' option we can provide no. of arguments for a single invocation of command.

Even after I close the terminal where i wrote this command, the songs continue to play as the process mpg123 becomes an orphan and continues to run.

devikasingh@Interest:~$ ps -e | grep mpg123

                   7239 ?        00:00:01 mpg123

ps -f 7239

UID PID PPID C STIME TTY STAT TIME CMD

1000 7239 1 0 15:21 ? S 0:01 mpg123 -Z /media/MUSIC & PIC/audio_for_you/For You.mp3 /media/MUSIC & PIC/audio_for_you/In My Place.mp3 /

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 10:13:22

Is this a comment, an additional problem, or an answer?

ephemient 2009-06-26 19:22:57

Glad you got it working alright, but without the random sort, won't it always play the same groups of songs? I would expect it would pick randomly from songs 1-10, then randomly from songs 11-20, etc. and these groupings would remain constant (until you add or remove files).

Matthew Flaschen 2009-06-26 22:13:15

I did try it, the groupings are not constant. I get to hear different songs each time I type this command. But yes.. I get to hear the songs from the same folder all the time! It seems that while searching for '.mp3', it looks into the folders in some order..Each time the same folder is getting picked. Although the songs chosen from that folder are random.

TwiggedToday 2009-06-27 17:01:45

That's basically what I meant. It looks into the folders in a deterministic order. You might want to try the random sort.

Matthew Flaschen 2009-06-28 04:54:55

Answer 5

A:

In both zsh and bash 4.0,

mpg123 -Z **/*.mp3

(Bash users will probably need to shopt -s globstar first.)

ephemient 2009-06-26 14:57:32

I am a bash user. Kindly explain more about shopt -s globastar. What is it?

TwiggedToday 2009-06-26 16:14:46

In Bash 4.0, it gives you ** which will perform a recursive search through the directory tree. Earlier versions of Bash do not support this feature.

ephemient 2009-06-26 17:02:21

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

how to play .mp3 songs randomly by searching for them recursively in a directory and its sub directories?

related questions