KesieV Chiefs

What can I do with 300 lines of Ruby?

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Welcome!

KesieV Chiefs is a small media player based on GTK2 and the famous Mplayer. It features a lot of things that you can find in a lot of other full-featured music players that populate the internet. The only difference is that is brewed with only 300 lines of Ruby code, using just the standard libs, except for the GUI. KesieV Chiefs is just a proof-of-concept and is not meant to be your default desktop player but, if you find it usable enough, can be your new best companion.

Features

KesieV Chiefs is less than 30k big, but has a lot of things inside.

  • GTK2 Interface
  • Audio/Video playback, using Mplayer as backend
  • Simple music database, with Artist/Album/Song panels
  • User created playlists
  • LastFM stations and scrobbling
  • Shoutcast and TV streams
  • Basic music sharing, using HTTP
  • Basic podcast client features
  • Searches on Wikipedia, Google, Youtube...
  • Playlist shuffling and sorting
  • Cover art parsing from Amazon or LastFM
  • Tray icon and window hiding
  • LibNotify notifications
  • libpurple compatible messenger status (i.e. Pidgin)
  • Optional cover browser
  • Easy plugin system

    • Some of these features needs some kind of configfile handling... No worry :)

    Screenshot

    Everybody loves screenshots. Mee too.

    Install & Configuration

    Since it is just an all-in-one Ruby script, you probably need just your installation of Ruby and the the Ruby-GTK package (GTK2 only - the full GNOME packages aren't required). Desktop notifies requires the Ruby-libnotify package - but, if you can't find it anywhere, you can use a plugin for calling the notify-send command line tool for having your notifies.
    You can configure a lot of things writing stuff in your ~/.kesievchiefs/settings file, adding one or more of these lines. If a key is not specified into your config file, the default value is used (described for each key).
    Remember to make KesieV Chiefs executable with the classic chmod +x kesievchiefs-0.1.rb.

    opt.musicroot=~/Music/
    Your music library root: MP3s are indexed starting from this directory.

    opt.covers=/home/kes/.kesievcheif/cover/
    opt.plugins=/home/kes/.kesievcheif/plugins
    Default folders for covers and plugins. Installing a plugin is quite easy: copy the plugin files into the plugin folder and restart KesieV Chiefs.

    opt.defaultentries=true
    Adds three example custom playlists: a sample podcast, a Favourites playlist and a localhost shared music playlist.

    opt.height=600
    opt.width=600
    The default player's window size.

    opt.iconsize=15
    The size of the icons beside each item into the playlist box.

    opt.filterheight=100
    The default height of the Artist/Album filter box. You can hide the box, putting a 0 into this configuration key and use the cover box as filter.

    opt.showcover=true
    Enable or disable the automatic cover downloader.

    opt.coverh=105
    opt.coverw=105
    The size of the cover shown into the playlist box into the main window.

    opt.coverbox=true
    opt.coverboxheight=150
    opt.coverboxh=105
    opt.coverboxw=105
    Enable and disable the big cover box under the toolbar and change the default height of the box. It is possible to set the size of each item into the cover box.

    opt.purple=true
    Enable and disable your Pidgin's status message while listening to the music.

    opt.lastfmpass=
    opt.lastfmuser=
    Your LastFM account details, for scrobbling your music. Sorry, your PW is in clear.

    opt.all=(All)
    opt.unknown=Unknown
    These are the strings used for unknown values of tags (unknown artist or unknown album) while indexing and for searching all artists or albums while filtering your library. You can leave these to their default value.

    opt.separator=#!#
    The sequence of chars that is used as field separator. Leave it to his default value and change it only if your music library contains the "#!#" somewhere.

    opt.serverport=12345
    The default port used for music sharing.

    Custom playlists

    KesieV Chiefs supports a number of different kinds of custom playlists: podcasts, shared folders, editable playlists etc. We will explain how to create some common items but keep in mind that different combination of attributes creates more kinds of playlists (and adding plugins you can create even more playlists). These lines are added into your config file too.

    User playlist

    You can make a selection of your music, streaming stations and more creating a custom editable playlist. Add this block to your configuration file for a sample user playlist.

    # A sample user playlist
    lists.label=Rock music
    lists.icon=apple-green
    lists.file=<your kesievchiefs root>/rockmusic

    A Rock Music playlist with a green apple as icon. Add as many of these you like!

    Shared music

    Hitting the File menu and then the Share/Unshare my music you can share your music database to other KesieV Cheif users... and to anyone, since is shared turning on a simple webserver :). Add these lines to the client's config file to see the server's shared music:

    # A sample shared source
    lists.label=Foobar's Music
    lists.icon=connect_established
    lists.root=http://<ip of remote server>:12345/
    lists.file=http://<ip of remote server>:12345/songs

    Quite simple, isn't it?

    Podcasts

    We can manage podcasts too, in a quick and dirty way ;) Let's add a custom playlist like this:

    # A sample podcast
    lists.label=Amplified podcast
    lists.xml=http://feeds.feedburner.com/amplified

    Not every podcast item has an enclosure, so, if only an URL is available, it is opened into your Firefox browser. And, for it, you can obviously put any RSS source ;)

    Plugins

    If you don't find KesieV Chiefs complete as you like, you can write your own plugin, implementing your favourite feature. You can have a look (and install) the funny Foobar plugin, which explains some of the capabilities of the plugin system. Since are written in Ruby too and are based on substituting some subs, you can virtually do anything you want. On the right side of this site there is a number of different plugins (one of these - the only really useful since now - adds Audio CD support to KesieV Chiefs). Download these into your ~/.kesievchiefs/plugins folder and restart your player. Some of these adds more kinds of user playlists: usually the instructions are into the comments on the top of the plugin sources.
    Did you wrote a funky plugin? Submit it here! (obviously de-garbage the mail address ;) )

    The 300 lines

     Clicking the About option into the Help menu, this box appears



    Since the scripts counts his lines by himself, you can say Yes, there are 300 lines of real code into KesieV Chiefs. This player was born just for learning the Ruby programming language, which is a really powerful language born and built using the objects paradigm. I've started KesieV Chiefs as a game: let's take some kind of software that can virtually grow forever and let's see how many features I can fit into keeping the sources 300 lines long.
    Playing this game (which I've already played with PHP - that time was a messenger) I think that you must learn something on the language you're studying, since, for example, learning that you can assign multiple variables in one line instead using multiple lines, you can reduce the code for many lines that can be used for implementing more features. And this "wave" effect continue until the remaining lines don't allow you to add features.
    Probably the resulting code will be a bunch of unreadable oneliners (that is terribly wrong in the Ruby philosophy) but since now, you know more about what you can do with Ruby. And this make you a better programmer.
    So, I've chosen to make a media player based on the really powerful Mplayer: nowdays a player can be a box with play/pause or a shopping cart with filters and tons of buttons.
    You can understand that this will not be probably the ultimate media player for Linux but... who knows? It does what is written on the label and does this enough good for the small database into my EEEPc... Let's the plugin dance begin :)

    Closing time

    You're probably trying to guess how this piece of software has such a weird name. That's because you don't know the Kaiser Chiefs group and their Ruby song, which is really nice and is featured in a lot of videogames (and I'm a f*cked gamer!).
    The last lines of this page are for Bianca (my GF) and Ulrick (a gr8 friend) which listened me evangelizing 24/7 Ruby and listened to my "feature of the day" gibberish.