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.
The app is relatively easy to install on Ubuntu 16.04, and relatively straightforward to use. The comprehensive help guide included for each supported music streaming service (tizonia --help googlemusic, tizonia --help youtube, etc) is terrifically to the point.
Tizonia uses a custom multimedia framework based on OpenMAX IL 1.2 (and not ffmpeg, libav, gstreamer or anything else you already have installed).
You can see the player in action in the following gif:
Configuration
You’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use Spotify, and a subscription to use Google Play Music. Soundcloud can be used for free, but you’ll need to create and add an authentication token to play it.
The Tizonia Github page provides more details on how to set up the config file with your credentials for Spotify, Soundcloud, et al.
YouTube, however, works “out of the box”, no configuration needed.
Listen to YouTube from the Terminal with Tizonia
Let’s say I want listen to music by UK pop-punk band Trash Boat on YouTube. 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
Which returns this:
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.
Because 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"
Tizonia returns a list of matching videos instantly, and starts streaming them (in order) right away — no messing about!
Thanks to MPRIS integration I can leave Tizonia running in the terminal in the background while I do something else. To control playback (e.g., skip, pause, etc) I can use the Ubuntu Sound Menu.
Other features
Tizionia is a versatile player as it can also play local files, and is able to act as a SHOUTcast/Icecast LAN server for local MP3 files.
For more information on the app skip over to the its Github page. There’ll you’ll find download links for a variety of distributions, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.