Plait 1.5.2 review

Plait (pronounced "play") is a new way to find and play music from the command line

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Stephen Jungels

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Plait (pronounced "play") is a new way to find and play music from the command line. Plait understands brief, easy to type queries that pick a single song, mix queries that combine works from multiple artists, and stream queries that find Shoutcast radio streams.

A variety of filters are available to pick just the music you want to hear. In order to actually play the music it finds, plait hands off a play list to one of the supported music players. The end result is that you can type commands like

plait "miles davis"
plait --mix mingus monk metheny
plait --stream salsa
plait --mixfile punk

and plait will seek out cuts from your library, or radio streams, and play them in your music player. Plait uses UNIX as a compatibility layer to target X Window, Windows with Cygwin, and OS X.

One of Plait's design goals is to support embedded Linux and streaming audio, suitable for NAS media servers like the Buffalo Linkstation and the Linksys NSLU2.

What's New in This Release:
Release 1.5.2 introduces an improved installer. It is now possible to install Plait without root privileges, in which case it installs in your home directory by default. If you install as root, Plait now installs to /usr/local by default rather than /usr. This is probably what most people want. In either case, you can override the default by providing an install directory as an argument to the install command. Also in this release, minor bugs are fixed in the XSPF web publishing feature.