A command-line/terminal/console Songza player, using VLC or MPD to play audio

pyza

pyza is a command-line (or terminal, or console, or whatever you want to call it) Songza player, originally based on MixZaTape. It can use VLC to play audio in a subprocess in the background, or send tracks to an MPD server to play. It runs best on Linux, but you can probably run it on OS X, and you might be able to get it working on Windows.

Requirements

Python 2.7+ (it might work on 2.6…)
BeautifulSoup4, packaged for Debian/Ubuntu as python-bs4.
VLC or MPD
MPD support requires python-mpd >= version 0.5.4. This is from the forked version known as python-mpd2, which may not be packaged in your distro yet. You can install it with pip.

Note: MPD versions older than 0.19 don’t have the addtags command, which means that track info won’t appear in the playlist.

Usage

It’s pretty self-explanatory:

usage: pyza [-h]
            [-l [{activities,genres,decades,moods} [{activities,genres,decades,moods} ...]]]
            [-e [term [term ...]]] [-i [term [term ...]]] [-f] [-d] [-n]
            [-m [host[:port]]] [-r] [-R] [--sort {name,songs,id}] [-v]
            [STATION|QUERY [STATION|QUERY ...]]

A terminal-based Songza client.  Plays with VLC by default, or with MPD.

positional arguments:
  STATION|QUERY         A station ID number, station name, partial station name, or category
                        query like activity:driving, decade:1960s, genre:jazz, or mood:happy.
                        You may abbreviate the category type like g:jazz, and you may use
                        multiple queries which will be ORed together.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l [{activities,genres,decades,moods} [{activities,genres,decades,moods} ...]]
                        List available categories
  -e [term [term ...]], --exclude [term [term ...]]
                        Exclude stations whose names or descriptions match any term
  -i [term [term ...]], --include [term [term ...]]
                        Include only stations whose names or descriptions match at least one term
  -f, --find            List stations matching queries
  -d, --descriptions    Show station descriptions
  -n, --names-only      Only search station names, not station descriptions or other data
  -m [host[:port]], --mpd [host[:port]]
                        Play with MPD server.  Default: localhost:6600
  -r, --random          Play one random station from stations matching queries
  -R, --random-stations
                        Play one song each from random stations matching queries
  --sort {name,songs,id}
                        Sort station list (default: number of songs)
  -v, --verbose         Be verbose, up to -vv

examples:
  pyza -f movies
  pyza -r mood:happy
  pyza -R g:jazz g:classical -e christmas
  pyza -R a:sleeping -i classical jazz -e sing

Examples

pyza -f movies lists stations containing movies in their names or descriptions.

pyza -r mood:happy plays a random station that fits a happy mood.

pyza -R g:jazz g:classical plays one track at a time from random stations in the jazz or classical genres.

pyza -R piano jazz -e christmas plays one track at a time from random stations containing jazz or piano in their names or descriptions, but not stations containing Christmas.

pyza -R a:sleeping -i classical jazz -e sing plays one track at a time from random stations suitable for sleeping, but only if they contain classical or jazz in their names or descriptions, and only if they do not contain sing in their names or descriptions. Because falling asleep to someone singing ain’t always easy.

pyza -f d:1960s finds and lists stations from the 1960s.

pyza 1744730 plays station #1744730.

pyza -n under\ the\ boardwalk plays the station named Under the Boardwalk. If you left off -n, it would instead list multiple stations, because it would also search on station descriptions. (You can–and should–quote strings instead of escaping the spaces, but due to a problem in the parser for this readme file, quotes don’t work within code strings. Doh…)

TODOs

Use gmusicapi to support new Google Now stuff.
Use signals or something to allow skipping tracks and voting.
Somehow provide access to the Songza concierge service?
~~Allow searching by activity, genre, or mood.~~

Credits

Thanks to TannerBaldus for writing most of the code for querying activities, genres, and moods.
Thanks to robu3 for creating MixZaTape, which inspired pyza.