Mingus is a frontend for GNU Emacs to the Music Player daemon. The interface closely, though not strictly, resembles that of ncmpc, which I had been using before (the main drawback of ncmpc for me was it’s apparent lack of support for unicode). It has some advantages over other clients, mainly in the field of playlist editing. This is achieved through marking and regions as you are used too in emacs and in dired. Mingus also provides a point-of-insertion for inserting new songs. This can be handy to drop a song after the currently playing one (enqueue), but is more flexible. Mingus is distributed under the GPL.

w3m

Another plus is its integration with emacs-w3m , in the sense that, when bumping into a sexy podcast or radio-stream while browsing in the browser of browsers, you have the ability to add any stream at point (and play it directly, if so desired).

Dired

Jump from Mingus to song at point in Dired, and, vice versa, add songs from Dired to the playlist.

Autocompletion on queries

Mingus has kind of autocompletion on queries. The browser can show either the song results or their parent directories. This lets you go easy on the tagging, and make good use of a simple file-system structured song collection. Mingus can be configured to use ido-mode completion.

Bookmarking

Mingus with version >= 0.32 (Fleurette Africaine) has bookmarks to remember filename and position. This can be very useful with audiobooks or working with language courses.

Global bookmarking shortcuts C-x r b and C-x r m are overwritten in Mingus' global map to have alike functionality, and C-x r d is set to mingus-bookmark-delete. The function mingus-bookmark-set (C-x r b) takes currently playing file + its current elapsed time. Buffer position is ignored. Mingus-bookmark-jump will jump to a bookmark. It inserts the file into the current playlist when it is not yet there.

Mingus stays home

If mingus stays home, i.e. the daemon mpd is run from the same computer as the client, mingus-stays-home.el provides an experimental cd-burning tool (mingus-burns). When you have taggit.el and the command-line taggit program mingus can call that with a selection of songs to perform (batch) tag editing.

Prerequisites

libmpdee.el by R. Ramkumar. Currently mingus runs on GNU Emacs22 and GNU Emacs 23. If you also want to use mingus-stays-home.el, cdrecord (or any other command-line cd-burning tool taking files as arguments) might be needed.

ToDo

mingus.el

• Add text-properties (fringe-bitmap?) for point-of-insertion
• Add a search buffer In this search buffer, you would be able to filter songs by their attributes. It would have a tabular layout, and you could safe-sort the songs. Maybe as-you-type, maybe not.