ncsb - An ncurses Squeezebox controller for Logitech Media Server (LMS)

Features

• slick curses TUI to control your squeezeboxes / squeezelite
• free-text and contextual search
• current playlist management
• player control
• album art in sixel-compliant terminals (experimental, off by default)
• regular crashes

Screenshot / screencast

players

Usage

with dependencies available to your environment,

$ ncsb lms-server

where lms-server is the hostname or IP address of your LMS server.

To use a port other than the default 9000, use the --port or -p optional argument,

$ ncsb -p 9090 lms-server

In any screen, press ? for available commands.

Installation

Requires python 3 (tested on 3.9-12), with python packages requests, hy (>=1.0) and (for optional coverart) libsixel-python.

To install these with pip into your current environment (venv etc...),

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Incomplete list of sixel-supporting terminals here See also foot, patched gnome-terminal?, xterm launced with xterm -ti vt340 or with xterm*decTerminalID : vt340 in .Xresources.

If you are seeing boxes or junk instead of nice unicode symbols for play/pause etc, you need to use a font with more complete unicode support. Hack works well.

In-terminal coverart requires libsixel to be installed on your system (presumably via your package manager) and a sixel-supporting terminal. Cover art notifications require libnotify to be installed.

Bugs

• flashing when loading album art, due to working around the nasty interactions between curses and sixel
• unable to write to top left of screen with curses when sixel image is displayed
• album title text update can partially overwrite the cover art sixel image
• because the font size and resolution is not known to curses, the album art size cannot be scaled to a terminal-appropriate size

Todo

• play general URL (pasted in)
• apps / podcast / menu
• detailed track info
• vim-style commands?
• colour themes
• use events instead of polling
• fix screencast
• scrolling when text is too wide for terminal

Credits

Copyright A S Sharma (2021), released under the GPL v3.0 (see LICENSE and AUTHORS). Thanks also to elParaguayo (LMSTools), Ralph Irving (squeezelite) and the Slimerver / Logitech Media Server authors for inspiration.