Vlcraptor

This is a queueing daemon for VLC - kind of like mpd but nowhere near as flexible or useful.

The player daemon starts two instances of VLC and then uses those to play any tracks placed in the queue.

Why two VLC instances? VLC doesn't support cross fading between tracks so this crossfades by starting the other VLC instance playing the next track and adjusting volume between both.

At the moment, only mac os is supported - minor changes would be required to allow this to work on linux.

You need to install VLC in the default location for mac os (/Applications/VLC.app).

brew install ffmpeg is required by the queue command for extracting tags to place in the queue.

brew install terminal-notifier is optional depending if you want terminal notifications when new tracks start.

This gem can be installed with gem install vlcraptor.

Running vlcraptor without any parameters will list the available subcommands.

Run vlcraptor player in a shell session.

This is the player daemon that controls two instances of VLC and is an ncurses application which will take over the display in that terminal.

You can quit with 'q', pause with ' ', stop with 's', play (resume) with 'p' and skip with 'n'.

vlcraptor queue folder_containing_audio_files audio_file.mp3 will place any number of audio files in the queue and the player should immediately start playing the first track.

vlcraptor list will list currently queued tracks with an estimated start time if the player is currently running and playing a track.

vlcraptor clear will clear all queued tracks.

vlcraptor remove 2 will remove queued track at index position 2.

vlcraptor swap 2 4 will swap the tracks at index positions 2 and 4.

vlcraptor pause will pause, vlcraptor stop will stop and vlcraptor play will resume.

vlcraptor skip will fade out the current track and start the next one (unless the queue is empty).

A number of features can be turned on/off while the player is running that will determine certain behaviour:

vlcraptor autoplay off will cause the player to stop and politely wait after the current track has finished. vlcraptor autoplay on and tracks will start playing again.

vlcraptor crossfade off will turn off crossfading so new tracks will start once the previous one is completely finished.

vlcraptor scrobble on will turn on last.fm scrobbling - you will require your own application api key and secret to enable this.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/markryall/vlcraptor.