MOC – The Best Music Player for Your Linux Console

MOC (Music On Console) is a Music player app for Linux/Unix Command Line Interface designed to be simple and robust enough to run smoothly without significantly affecting other I/O operations.

MOC performs sleekly despite system or I/O load because, according to the dev team, it

uses the output buffer in a separate thread. It provides gapelss playback because the next file to be played is reached while the current file is playing.

Top Features in MOC

You will be surprised at how efficient MOC music player is as it has:

  • An inbuilt simple equalizer
  • A mixer that you can connect to an external mixer
  • Theme options
  • Fully Customizable key mapping
  • Support for Internet streams
  • Playlist and directory search
  • Character set conversion using iconv()
  • JACK, ALSA, SNDIO, and OSS output types

What’s New in MOC 2.5.2?

The latest version was released last year November and it came with a lot of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and some new features including:

  • Complete support for Sndfile formats
  • DSD format support via FFmpeg/Libav
  • OSS sound driver 24-bit support

You can check out more about the latest release here.

Using MOC Music Player

For those who not conversant with the CLI MOC, might seem tedious to use but believe me, it is not. Start it up in your terminal using

$ mocp
Moc - Linux Terminal Music Player
MOC – Linux Terminal Music Player

Use your keyboard to navigate to your music directory and hit Enter to begin playing a track. MOC will automatically play all the tracks within that directory so you have no need to create a playlist.

However, you have the option to combine music files from various directories into a single playlist and nd even though your playlists will be automatically stored, you can decide to save them as m3u files and load them whenever you want.

Remember that MOC runs sleekly without interfering with other terminal and I/O operations? Press Q to return to your terminal window without switching off MOC and when you want to return to the MOC interface type in mocp.

MOC’s keyboard shortcuts are:
  • p – plat music
  • b – previous track
  • n – next track
  • q – hide MOC interface

See the complete list of commands by hitting "h" on your keyboard to access the help menu.

Installing MOC Music Player on Linux

Installation is stress-free because its PPA is natively supported and it runs as a plugin. To install via the terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install moc moc-ffmpeg-plugin

If you would prefer to install via .deb package or you’re interested in the source code and other formats access them here.

Is this the first time you are hearing about MOC music player? I am considering making it my default music player. How about you give it a try to see for yourself? Don’t forget to tell us about your experience in the comments section below.

Divine Okoi is a cybersecurity postgrad with a passion for the open-source community. With 700+ articles covering different topics in IT, you can always trust him to inform you about the coolest tech.

Each tutorial at GeeksMint is created by a team of experienced writers so that it meets our high-quality writing standards.

7 thoughts on “MOC – The Best Music Player for Your Linux Console”

  1. Hey, I tried to run MOC but it launch an error:
    Running the server…
    Trying JACK…
    Trying ALSA…
    mocp: alsa.c:319: alsa_read_mixer_raw: Assertion `RANGE(0, vol, 100)’ failed.

    FATAL_ERROR: Server exited!

    Any hints?

    Reply
  2. MOC is a great music player, I used before, then I left it from a while, but know is my choose because I’m using a tilling window manager herbstluftwm, really like it. Thanks you to remind me this great player!

    Reply
  3. Great player. Any way to link ranger (console file manager with VI key bindings) to launch mocp – the ALSA plug-in? (Since ranger ships with rifle, a file launcher that is good at automatically finding out which program to use for what file type, the solution might be here).

    Reply
  4. I can’t install it I gat this error:

    Package moc is not available, but is referred to by another package.
    This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
    is only available from another source

    E: Package ‘moc’ has no installation candidate
    E: No se ha podido localizar el paquete moc-ffmpeg-plugin

    Someone?

    Reply
  5. I had it installed, but used it for the first time today. mplayer had been my default CLI music player for ages (and VLC on the desktop). I think moc might become my new default music player overall.

    Reply
    • Well, I’m glad you got to finally test it out. MOC is my preference but I think mplayer offers more customization features, right?

      Reply

Got Something to Say? Join the Discussion...