When I listen to music, I mostly use my atom-board home server as a player and of course I want to control it from remote. But I don't like those complicated networked sound architectures (mpd, pulseaudio, jack). I just want to ssh on the box, put some music on the playlist and disconnect.

To do that, you obviously need a player that works from the command line. So far I used herrie. It has done a great job and I still like its simple interface.

But recently I wanted to upgrade from the onboard Intel HD audio to a solution with optical out. As I will need the single PCI slot for a gigabit ethernet card, I bought a USB soundcard, a "Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi 5.1 Sourround Pro USB". It works pretty much out of the box, you just need to build snd-usb-audio module into the kernel (3.0.4 that is). Sadly it's a pretty stupid device: It has no hardware mixer. So alsamixer won't give me a volume control bar, unless I set one up through a complicated asound.conf soft mixer. But I don't really need that anyway.

So, back on topic, the new USB soundcard now is connected, but for some reason herrie doesn't work well with it. Sound is horrible and stuttering. Maybe I'll file a bug...

So it was time to look for other players. Gentoo has media-sound/moc. Turns out it was a good idea to try something new. First of all, moc works nicely with the USB soundcard. It might have something to do with the architecture. Moc is multithreaded and has a seperate thread for the playback and for the user interface.

This is how moc looks on my console:

Besides beeing a functional console music player, moc also has some cool features:

• can run in the background (without screen)
• is themable
• can seek pretty fast
• has it's own soft mixer for volume
• supports a good number of audio formats

So if you are looking for a good console audio player, you can give it a try.