cmus

cmus (C* Music Player) is a console music player for Unix-like operating systems. It runs in a terminal using an ncurses interface and is written in C. It is documented through two man pages: cmus and cmus-tutorial.

Audio support is built from optional input and output plugins that are selected at build time. ./configure auto-detects available features, and the generated config.mk shows which CONFIG_* options were enabled. The README lists dependency packages for plugins covering formats and backends such as FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, MP3 (libmad), Musepack, WavPack, ModPlug, AAC (faad), and FFmpeg (libavformat/libavcodec), plus CD audio with CDDB/discid lookup. Output options include ALSA, libao, JACK, PulseAudio, and sndio. Only pkg-config, ncurses, iconv, and elogind/systemd are required.

It is built from source with ./configure, make and make install (use gmake on some BSD systems). The README gives dependency install commands for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL (with RPMFusion), Arch Linux, Alpine, Termux, and Homebrew. A DESTDIR option supports staged installs for packaging. It suits users who want to play a local music library from the terminal. Building with ./configure DEBUG=2 writes debug output to ~/cmus-debug.txt.