Play Musepack audio files using the command line

Apr 02, '03 09:57:00AM

Contributed by: master

Musepack is a fairly new high-quality lossy audio format that is quickly gaining popularity among the audiophile community. There was no way to play these files on a Mac without decoding them to large uncompressed audio files first. After becoming quite peeved at this, I found a way to play these files directly, without having to deal with any file conversions.

To do this, you must have esd (The Enlightened Sound Daemon) installed. I recommend using fink's port. (fink install esd). After doing this, grab the OS X binary [48K download] I built using Frank Klemm's mppdec source. After unzipping, open up a Terminal and cd to the directory containing the unzipped mppdec and follow these instructions:

% chmod u+x mppdec
(to change the file permissions to enable you to execute the binary)
% sudo mv mppdec /usr/local/bin/
(OPTIONAL: this allows you to run the command by simply typing 'mppdec' anywhere)
% mppdec FILENAME.mpc | esdcat
and you will hear beautiful mpc audio. You can also use wildcards:
% mppdec *.mpc | esdcat
or even m3u playlists:
% mppdec playlist.m3u | esdcat
Also, type mppdec for more command line options.

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