MOC - music on console

Here is another unstable release. The hardest change for me was the UTF8 support. Please comment if you have problems with it. WMA is also here, but seeking does not work. Tilo Stritzky helped me porting MOC to OpenBSD, so this release should compile under OpenBSD 3.8.

Full list of changes:

• Support for WMA and RealAudio using FFmpeg (seeking does not work!).
• Moving items up and down: u and j commands.
• UTF-8 support.
• MOC can now be compiled under OpenBSD. Thanks to Tilo Stritzky for pointing out the issues.
• Added darkdot theme. (David Lazar )
• Strip leading and trailing white characters from URLs entered by user.
• Added FollowPlayedFile option: menu follows the currently played file so that it is scrolled if the file is outside the visible part (default to yes).
• Tags cache saved to a file on exit and read at startup.
• Added a command for adding a URL to the playlist using entry (CTRL-u).
• Count speex time without scaning the whole file.
  Display the current time for internet streams.

I had a two months break from MOC, but I'm back. Yesterday I've finished (almost) UTF-8 support, this was harder than I expected and not everything is working properly.

There is also a good news for those who wanted WMA in MOC. I've just done it. The plugin is called ffmpeg and as the name suggests it uses FFmpeg, so not only WMA is supported, but also RealAudio (.ra files) and other formats handled by this library can be played just by adding their file extensions to the list. Unfortunately, there are also some drawbacks. Seeking doesn't work and I don't know why, it also doesn't work with ffplay, so this could be an ffmpeg problem. Personally, I don't use WMA, so I will not test it much. Any comments are welcome.

2.4.0-alpha2 will be released soon, if you want to test new features now, use SVN source.

If the development version of MOC fails to run with a message like:

FATAL_ERROR: Parse error in the keymap file line 39: unknown command

The problem is a change made in keymap commands.

To fix it, change toggle_playlist to toggle_menu in your keymap file. For example (with default keymap) change this:

toggle_playlist = l

to:

toggle_menu = l

I've put the roadmap for MOC on the web site. It doesn't contain any dates, but currently it's a better TODO file (that is included with the MOC's sources). It's more up-to-date and marks things as done/working. It includes plans for 2.4 release and gives an idea how far we are.

I've decided to use my favorite CMS (Drupal) on MOC's home page. This will hopefully improve the site's usablity. There are few advantages of this solution:

• You can create an account and be notified about news by email.
• In future, extending the site by adding a wiki, FAQ or other documentation will be easier.
• Updating the site is easier for me.
• phpBB was insecure and hard to maintain.
• It look's nicer, because it's not mine design :)

There are also some drawbacks, posts from old forum have been lost, and the Drupal's forum isn't as good as phpBB from the users point of view IMHO.

Here is 2.4.0-alpha1 release. I've spent most of the time on redesigning the interface code. The change is not really visible for a user, but it was necessary for further development, the old code couldn't be maintained any more. This caused also that despite of the long time between 2.3.0 and 2.4.0-alpha1, there are less changes than in previous alpha1 releases. What you can see just after compiling and running this version is the change in the interface layout as you can see on screenshots. This is first such a change from the beginning of MOC. Please comment this version on forum.

All changes are:

• Layout of the main window can be changed using Layout[123] options.
  Switching between layouts is done using the 'l' key and now TAB is used to
  switch between the playlist and the directory menu. For example, you can
  configure the layout to see both the playlist and a directory content.
• Redesign of the interface code. This is a big change in the code, but not
  really visible to the user. It was necessary to maintain and extend the
  interface in the future.
• Tags are cached at the server side and read in a separate thread. The
  interface is not locked until the tags are read. Size of the cache can be
  adjusted using TagsCacheSize.
• Numbering items in the playlist. Can be turned off using
  PlaylistNumbering.
• MusicDir can be a playlist.
• Commands: --append, --clear, --play work now as expected even if there is
  no client running.
• Use full paths instead of just file names for displaying on the playlist.
• Silent seeking can be configured using SilentSeekTime option.
• After adding a file to the playlist, the cursor is moved down.
• The help screen's position is kept when it's not displayed.
• Some operations like deleting items from the playlist should now be
  faster.
• Added moca_theme. (Nicola Vitale)
• Added red_theme. (yyz)

I've just received a nice patch from cbass that fixes 2 bugs: searching for directories and moving up and down when using '/' or 'g' (search) command. It is too late to include it in 2.3.2, but you can download the patch from the patches section.

Here goes another bugfix release: 2.3.2. See the changelog for details.