commandlinePlay

Uses VLC media player and a music database to search for and play music from the linux command line.

It works in two parts. The first one, the play python module, does most of the work. It accepts a series of search terms and then looks through a compatible SQLite3 database (the Lollypop music player database, by default) for the songs before launching VLC media player.

The second part, the key listener, will listen for arguments for the python module from the keyboard without changing window focus, with audio feedback to ensure that the user knows that they are inputing into the program. This part will need to be run by a user added to the input user group.

Building

The listener can be built with the following command

gcc capture.c -o play_capture

The Python module does not require any external dependencies as far as execution goes.

Song Database

By default, the Python module will pull music from the databases maintained by the Lollypop music player at ~/.local/share/lollypop (specifically, lollpop.db and playlists.db). However, you can supply your own and pass the directory containing the two databases via the --directory argument.

In either case, there must be two databases. The lollypop.db database will contain the tracks as well as additional information like albums and artists. There is also a playlists.db that contains playlist information.

lollypop.db

commandlinePlay requires 4 tables from lollypop.db: tracks, albums, artists, and track_artists.

tracks

This row contains tracks.

column	type	description
id	INTEGER	The ID of the track. This is used to join this table with other tables.
uri	TEXT	The URI to the file of the song.
name	TEXT	The title of the song.
album_id	INTEGER	The ID of the album the song belongs to. This corresponds to an album in the albums table.

albums

This row contains albums.

column	type	description
id	INTEGER	The ID of the album. This is used to join this table with tracks.
name	TEXT	The name of the album.

artists

This table contains artists, with each row being an artist.

column	type	description
id	INTEGER	The ID of the artist. This is used to join this table with track_artists.
name	TEXT	The name of the artist.

track_artists

This table joins tracks and artists, with each row being an artist that contributed to a song.

column	type	description
track_id	INTEGER	The ID of a song. This is used to join this table with tracks.
artist_id	INTEGER	The ID of an artist that contributed to the song. This corresponds to an id in artists.

playlists.db

This database contains playlist information. It is separate from the lollypop.db database, as tracks are represented using only their file paths here.

playlists

This table contains all playlists, with each row being a playlist.

column	type	description
id	INTEGER	The ID of a playlist.
name	TEXT	The name of a playlist.

tracks

This table contains all tracks that are part of a playlist. Each row corresponds to a single track.

column	type	description
playlist_id	INT	The ID of the playlist that this track belongs to. This corresponds to a playlist in the playlists table.
uri	TEXT	The link to the track as a URI path.