This is music123 version 16.4.

music123's goal in life is simple. With just mpg123 or ogg123, there
was no way to randomly play a mixed batch of ogg's and mp3's.  If
you fed the wrong file to the wrong player, it would crash.

xmms could randomly play mixed ogg's and mp3's, but I'm frequently
not in X. I'm sure there's some ncurses solution out there, but I
like the mpg123/ogg123 interface - I just want something that can
handle mixed collections of files. So I wrote music123.

music123 has a similar interface to mpg123 and ogg123. It'll play
any type of file listed in its config file, the first found of
~/.music123rc or /etc/music123rc. The default config file includes
lines for mp3, ogg, and wav. With older versions of vorbis-tools,
only Ogg Vorbis files would play, but newer ones also handle
Ogg Flac and Ogg Speex.

ogg123, by default, has the default device set to /dev/null. Since
music123 normally uses the default device of ogg123, it won't play
ogg files if you haven't changed that option. Fixes include editing
/etc/libao.conf to change the default device of ogg123, or change
the ogg123 line in /etc/music123rc to include a device option for
ogg123 in the quotes.

This is a very simple shell; if the music doesn't play under your
sound system, check the programs that music123 calls. In specific,
both ogg123 and mpg321 use libao, so they can be set to use arts
by setting "default_driver=arts" in /etc/libao.conf or ~/.libao,
or by changing
tool    ogg123          ogg,Ogg,OGG             ""
to
tool    ogg123          ogg,Ogg,OGG             "-d arts"
in /etc/music123. (I generally recommend the first approach.) aplay,
which plays wave files, is a Linux-only program; I, unfortunately,
don't know a more general replacement.

The half-second pause between songs is deliberate, so music123 can
be killed by Control-C. Note that it can be removed with the -D
option, or changed by -d.

If anyone has added stuff to /etc/music123rc, I'd like to see it so
I can add it into the master file (probably commented out). Note
that it expects the exact same case for the extension as listed in
that file.

--
David Starner - dvdeug@debian.org
Last change on December 16, 2756 AUC (2003 AD).
--
Xavier Grave <xavier.grave@csnsm.in2p3.fr>
Minor modification on March, 2010
