Yesterday I found out about ‘mplayer’, which is a movie/music player for Unix that can be completely controlled from the terminal (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/). I started playing around with it while at the same time learning reference classes. The result, a music player in R!

Code

It is very basic and abit buggy (mainly in displaying unwanted warning messages) but does seem to work. The code above (requires tcltk package) gives the reference class “playlist”. First we create a new empty playlist:

pl <- playlist$new()

Next we fill the playlist by manually adding music files:

pl$add()

or by importing all music files in a folder (recursively):

pl$dir()

Both open a gui window by default, but can be supplied a character with the locations as well.

Now we can shuffle the playlist if we want:

pl$shuffle()

Finally, start playing:

pl$play()

And if we don't want to listen anymore:

pl$stop()

Furthermore 'pause' can be used to pause playing, 'skip' to skip a song, 'step' to skip multiple songs and 'previous' to go back a song.

I have only tested this on a Linux computer (Ubuntu 11.10).