cursebox 0.9.2b1

Motivation

The year is 2017, and time is ripe for a terminal interface for controlling the excellent, but unfortunately discontinued, range of Squeezeboxes by Logitech (and before that, Slimdevices).

Despite the fact that the product line was officially killed by Logitech in 2012, the ecosystem still lives on, stronger than ever. Various soft- and hardware projects for the ecosystem are actively being developed, which truly emphasises the beauty and brilliance of both the Squeezebox/LMS ecosystem in particular, and open source in general.

These days, software Squeezeboxes run on virtually any hardware available capable of playing audio. Various programs and apps for easy control of Squeezeboxes exist for almost any platform you can think of… Except for one important but neglected platform: The terminal.

In October 2016, the Cursebox team set out on a mission to correct this neglect and provide the terminal interface for Squeezeboxes we have all needed for so many years.

What does it do?

Cursebox is an interactive utility that allows you to control your Squeezeboxes from the terminal. Building on top of the telnet interface provided by the Logitech Media Server, Cursebox makes searching, playing and queueing music from your library a breeze. Playing your favorite songs is only a few keystrokes away, thanks to the intuitive keyboard-only navigation provided by Cursebox.

Simply launch Cursebox, type sa to search for an album, then type the first letters of the name of an album, Tab through the find-as-you-type search results until the right album is highligted, press Enter, press p and the album instantly starts playing on your Squeezebox. All this can be done in a matter of seconds. No more having to navigate to the web interface of LMS to find your music by clicking around. Never again will you have the need to find your Squeezebox control app of choice on your smartphone and tap through menus and options.

Do you want to change the volume level? Type v and then use familiar j/k keys to de- and increase the volume level. Or simply press any number to change the volume level to any multiple of 10%.

Pressing space toggles play/pause, and p gives you access to your current playlist, in case you want to skip to another track.

It’s all there at your fingertips, a few keystrokes away, right at home, in the terminal.

The future

Currently, Cursebox has a basic set of features. There are still lots of missing features that would be nice to implement. But things take time, and the Cursebox team decided to release early, with support for the most often used features, rather than keeping this fundamentally useful utility in the dark for ourselves.

We have a daunting journey ahead of us, implementing further features. But we also have the guts to take on the responsibility and turn our (and your) dreams into reality.

Requirements

Cursebox requires nothing but Python 3 on your system.

Installation and basic usage

Clone the repository to a location of your own choice. Then run the cursebox.py script to see your options:

Usage: cursebox [OPTIONS] [ARG]
Squeezebox and music library control. Make Squeezeboxes great again!

OPTIONS

The following options are recognised:

  -c, --config          Path to configuration file. Optional. Default location
                        is ~/.cursebox.conf
  -s, --server          Hostname of the LMS server to connect to.
  -p, --port            Port of the LMS server to connect to. Optional,
                        defaults to 9090.
  -u  --username        Username used for authentication with LMS. Optional.
  -P  --password        Password used for authentication with LMS. Optional.
  -b, --player_id       ID (MAC address) of the Squeezebox to connect to.
  -h, --help            Show this help message. Obviously optional.

ARGUMENT(S)

Only a single argument (or none at all) is allowed. Can be one of
the following:

  create-config         Create a new default configuration file in
                        ~/.cursebox.conf (if it doesn't already exist).

Prodiving no arguments will simply launch Cursebox.

It is strongly advised to create a configuration file with your static settings and, optionally, an alias that will run the script with the correct options for you if any of these are dynamic (e.g. player_id based on your location) or secret (e.g. password), to make everything even more smooth and easy.