pspiagicw@falconite $

kato

published
reading time
2 minutes

kato

kato is a MPD client.

Features

kato is a mpd client. It acts like a remote controller to a already running music server.

  • Psuedo-TUI interface.
  • Easy & Simple commands.
  • Intuitive interface

Installation

You need to have a configured and running MPD server.

You can download a binary from the releases section.

Or else if you have the Go compiler installed. You can run

go install github.com/pspiagicw/kato@latest

If you use gox, you can also run

gox install github.com/pspiagicw/kato@latest

To build the project, download the project and run go build .

git clone https://github.com/pspiagicw/kato
cd kato
go build .

Documentation

kato includes a thorough help section.

Just run kato help

kato help

For more help per command, run kato help [command]

Commands

Simple commands

Command Description
play Play the current song
stop Stop playback
pause Pause playback
next Play next song
prev Play previous song
toggle Toggle playback
version Print version info

status

  • Print info about current song
  • Includes title, artist, quant size and frequency

status

album

  • Run a album
  • Interactively select the album
  • The current queue is cleared.
  • random is turned off.

album

artist

  • Play songs by a specific artist
  • Multi-select songs.
  • The current queue is cleared
  • random is turned off.

volume

shuffle

  • Shuffle all songs in the library.
  • random is turned on.

volume

  • Control volume interactively.

volume

seek

  • Control song position interactively.
  • Use l/h to move right or left
  • Or use number keys to adjust percent directory (1=10%, 9=90%, 0=100%)

seek

playlist

  • Display the playlist in a pager.

playlist

dash

  • Display a simple dash UI with essential info.
  • Simple keybinds to next/prev songs.

dash

repeat

  • Repeat current song indefinately.
  • repeat is turned on.
  • single is turned on.

Purpose

kato doesn’t aim to replace tools like ncmpcpp and mpc.

It only provides a helpful interface for common interactions like

  • Playing a album
  • Play all songs but shuffled.

It provides quality of life features that would require some scripting or a learning curve in other clients. If you want complex, minute edits you WILL need to use tools like mpc.

Or if you need a TUI experience complete with a visualizer and other goodies, you will need to use ncmpcpp.

Contribution

This tool is made to provide qol features, thus your opinion and contribution is essential to this project.

  • You can file a issue to request a feature or report a bug
  • If you a little bit of Go, you can fix/implement said feature/bug and file a PR.

You can also show your love for kato by giving this project a star on GitHub.