Announcing mplaylist: Audio playlist player using mplayer, with checkpointing

This blog post is the formal announcement of mplaylist, and audio playlist player using mplayer, with checkpointing.

mplaylist is Python script which can play audio playlists (.m3u files), remembering the current playback position (file and time) even when killed, so it will resume playback at the proper position upon restart. The playback position is saved as an .m3u.pos file next to the .m3u file. mplaylist uses mplayer for playing the audio files.

mplayer needs Python and a Unix system with mplayer installed. (It may be easy to port to Windows, but it has not been tried.) Download the script directly from here. There is no GUI. You have to start mplayback from the command-line, in a terminal window.

The reason why I wrote mplaylist is that I needed the following features and I couldn't easily find an audio player for Ubuntu which had all of them:

• It supports multiple playlists.
• It remembers the playback position (file and time) for each playlist.
• Preferably, it remembers playback position even when the process is killed.
• Lets the user adjust playback speed, without changing the pitch.

mplaylist supports all these features. Checkpointing (i.e. remembering the playback position) works even if both the mplayer and mplaylist processes are killed with kill -9 (SIGKILL). If you have a journaling filesystem with block device barriers properly set up, checkpointing also works if you unplug the power cable.

Please note that mplaylist is not only for music files. It works excellently for playing back (series of) audio books and (series of) talks.