Moosic - A musical jukebox program.
Version 1.5.0
By Daniel Pearson

Moosic is a music player that focuses on convenient and powerful playlist
management.  It consists of a server process that maintains a queue of music
files to play and a client program which sends commands to the server.  The
server continually runs through its playlist, popping items off the top of the
list and playing each with an external program.  The standard client is a simple
command-line utility which allows you to perform powerful operations upon the
server's queue, including the addition of whole directory trees, automatic
shuffling, and item removal according to regular expressions.  The server comes
configured to play MP3, Ogg, MIDI, MOD, and WAV files.

REQUIREMENTS:
The primary requirement is a Python interpreter that supports version 2.2 of the
language (or later) and also includes support for threads.  It also relies on
the Unix "find" utility.  It relies upon external programs for actually playing
the music files.  The default setup uses mpg123 for MP3, timidity for MIDI,
ogg123 for Ogg/Vorbis, mikmod for the whole range of MOD formats, and SOX for a
wide variety of sound other (mostly uncompressed) sound file formats.  Moosic
will only work on Unix systems, since it uses a wide variety of Unix-only
features.  All of these portability issues are noted within the source code.

INSTALLATION:
After extracting the archive file (tarball) used to distribute Moosic, the
executables and manpages can be installed by using the "make install" command
from within the directory that contains Moosic's source files.  By default, this
command installs Moosic within the /usr/local directory, and thus requires the
command to be run as the root user to be effective.  If you wish to install
Moosic into another directory, use the following command, replacing "[dest]"
with the name of the directory you wish to use: "make install
INSTALL_PREFIX=[dest]".

USAGE:
"moosic" is the command-line program that provides the main interface to the
Moosic jukebox.  It works by sending a command to the Moosic server and
returning the response, if any.  The first non-option argument given to moosic
is the name of the command to be performed.  Use "moosic --showcommands" to get
a list of all the different possible commands, or read moosic's manual page.
There are very many commands, so you should start by just learning a few
commonly used commands, and only learning others as you feel the need.  I
recommend starting with the following short command vocabulary: add, list, stop,
play, and shuffle.

For example, "moosic add foo.mp3" adds the file foo.mp3 (in the current
directory) to the end of the song queue and returns you immediately back to your
shell prompt without printing any output (unless an error occurs).  Compare with
"moosic list", which will list the contents of the song queue.  Note that if the
song queue is empty, "moosic list" will not display anything.

Any command which takes a list of files as an argument will also accept
directories, and doing so will cause every file below that directory to be
included in the file-list.  Note that the default behavior of moosic is to
shuffle everything in a file-list before sending the list to the server, but
only after recursively expanding named directories.  Use "moosic --help" to
learn about options for changing the shuffling behavior, as well as other
options.

When the Moosic server isn't already running, moosic will automatically start it
for you by launching the program named "moosicd" (unless you specifically
request otherwise).


Copyright (C) 2001-2003 Daniel Pearson <daniel@nanoo.org>

This program is free software, and can be redistributed and/or modified under
the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).  See the file named
"License" for more details.
