Play Plugin¶
The play
plugin allows you to pass the results of a query to a music
player in the form of an m3u playlist.
Usage¶
To use the play
plugin, enable it in your configuration (see
Using Plugins). Then use it by invoking the beet play
command with
a query. The command will create a temporary m3u file and open it using an
appropriate application. You can query albums instead of tracks using the
-a
option.
By default, the playlist is opened using the open
command on OS X,
xdg-open
on other Unixes, and start
on Windows. To configure the
command, you can use a play:
section in your configuration file:
play:
command: /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC
You can also specify additional space-separated options to command (like you would on the command-line):
play:
command: /usr/bin/command --option1 --option2 some_other_option
While playing you’ll be able to interact with the player if it is a command-line oriented, and you’ll get its output in real time.
Configuration¶
To configure the plugin, make a play:
section in your
configuration file. The available options are:
- command: The command used to open the playlist.
Default:
open
on OS X,xdg-open
on other Unixes andstart
on Windows. Insert{}
to make use of the--args
-feature. - relative_to: If set, emit paths relative to this directory. Default: None.
- use_folders: When using the
-a
option, the m3u will contain the paths to each track on the matched albums. Enable this option to store paths to folders instead. Default:no
. - raw: Instead of creating a temporary m3u playlist and then opening it,
simply call the command with the paths returned by the query as arguments.
Default:
no
. - warning_treshold: Set the minimum number of files to play which will
trigger a warning to be emitted. If set to
no
, warning are never issued. Default: 100.
Optional Arguments¶
The --args
(or -A
) flag to the play
command lets you specify
additional arguments for your player command. Options are inserted after the
configured command
string and before the playlist filename.
For example, if you have the plugin configured like this:
play:
command: mplayer -quiet
and you occasionally want to shuffle the songs you play, you can type:
$ beet play --args -shuffle
to get beets to execute this command:
mplayer -quiet -shuffle /path/to/playlist.m3u
instead of the default.
If you need to insert arguments somewhere other than the end of the
command
string, use $args
to indicate where to insert them. For
example:
play:
command: mpv $args --playlist
indicates that you need to insert extra arguments before specifying the playlist.