To control playback (e.g., skip, pause, etc) I can use the Ubuntu Sound Menu. Thanks to MPRIS integration I can leave Tizonia running in the terminal in the background while I do something else. Tizonia returns a list of matching videos instantly, and starts streaming them (in order) right away - no messing about! Since I don’t have a specific track, video or playlist I want to listen to I’m going to use the YouTube search option.īecause I only want to listen to studio recordings (and not tinny gig recordings) I’ll use an appropriate search term to narrow things down to Trash Boat’s official music videos: tizonia -youtube-audio-search 'trash boat official' I first run Tizonia with the YouTube help command to see which options are available to me and how to use them: tizonia -help youtube

Let’s say I want listen to music by UK pop-punk band Trash Boat on YouTube. Listen to YouTube from the Terminal with Tizonia YouTube, however, works “out of the box”, no configuration needed. The Tizonia Github page provides more details on how to set up the config file with your credentials for Spotify, Soundcloud, et al. Soundcloud can be used for free, but you’ll need to create and add an authentication token to play it. You’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use Spotify, and a subscription to use Google Play Music. You can see the player in action in the following gif:

Tizonia uses a custom multimedia framework based on OpenMAX IL 1.2 (and not ffmpeg, libav, gstreamer or anything else you already have installed).

The comprehensive help guide included for each supported music streaming service ( tizonia -help googlemusic, tizonia -help youtube, etc) is terrifically to the point. The app is relatively easy to install on Ubuntu 16.04, and relatively straightforward to use.

Tizonia is a command-line music player that let you stream music from Spotify, Google Play Music, YouTube, Soundcloud, and more, straight from the terminal.

Spotify ubuntu command line