If you are like me, who starts starts iTunes with default library and realize you have heard the same song 8 times in the last week, here are two one-line-Jukebox scripts for you. The scripts randomly choose and play songs right from the command line.
Before using the script make sure you have an mp3 player installed. I have installed lightweight mpg123, however you can use any player. I would recommend mplayer for Linux.
While running the scripts, I pass ~/Music folder argument. Change the path to point to folder where you store your mp3s.
First one is in Ruby, and shamelessly inspired by Kevin Baird’s book.
Open a text editor and save this script. I named it shuffle_play.rb. (You need to have ruby installed on your system. Installed on Leopard and most Linux distributions by default.)
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w
ARGV.sort_by{ rand }.each {|file| system("mpg123 \"#{file}\"")}
To run the jukebox
ruby shuffle_play.rb ~/Music/*.mp3
For the second, I ported above script to bash, which is even more simple and can run on any Linux or OS X. Lets name the script shuffle_play_shell.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
n=0;for songs in "$@" ; do song_array[n]=$songs ;((n++)) ; done; for ((i=0;i<$n;i+=1));do number=$RANDOM; let "number %= $n"; `mpg123 "${song_array[number]}"`; done
To run the jukebox
source shuffle_play_shell.sh ~/Music/*.mp3
Update: The second one is not completely random. It will choose n random songs out of n songs. However it does not checks if each song is played at-least once, thus chances of songs getting repeated. Any suggestions?