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Could someone explain in a very general sense how EMMS is intended to be used? I am a refugee from the world of GUI music players and perhaps my mind has been warped by that. But I haven't been able to understand from the official documentation the basic idea of what functions to call at what time.

I am generally pretty Emacs-literate, and have installed EMMS. I've managed to get tracks playing by a kind of process of trial and error. I've even managed to fumble my way to creating a playlist and saving it. But I haven't figured out how to re-load it later and use it again.

It seems that the playlist is the central abstraction in EMMS, and I gather that your whole library is basically a playlist (?) but I'm not sure where to go from there, or how to use it on a "day-to-day" basis.

If I have, for example, a playlist that I've saved, it seems like maybe the idea is that I have to first do emms-playlist-new to create an empty buffer to hold the saved playlist, then I have to be in that buffer and do emms-insert-m3u-playlist (or similar, depending on the type of the playlist) and then I can use the playlist -- though the lines are just the file names, not track name, artist name, etc. Is this really the way EMMS is intended to be used, or am I missing something that makes it simpler?

Thanks for any help....

EvansWinner
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  • This post is currently very broad, which doesn't fit well with the SE format. Could you narrow it down to a discrete question, please? – Dan Sep 14 '15 at 18:38
  • Possibly there is no intended usage, anybody does as he likes. Currently I use emms via (emms-play-url "http://my_favorite_radio.chan/play.m3u"). And then the M-x emms buffer for stopping and resuming. – Marco Wahl Sep 14 '15 at 19:56
  • I dont' know ! I use mpg123.el (in MELPA), but it isn't such feature rich. Here you have some basic doc about emms too: http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Media_player#Mpg123 – Ehvince Sep 15 '15 at 10:35
  • I believe that the close votes can be avoided if you changed the title of the question to ask about loading of a saved play-list (this would be a question easier to answer in the format of SE, and it seems like this is, technically, what you are after). – wvxvw Sep 15 '15 at 18:06
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    Just back in 2021 to reassert - it's a nightmare. I cant figure out playlists at all. And that's just trying to create one from selections in another. It seems you must create a playlist wit all your thousands of tracks and edit that. aargh. – RichieHH Feb 19 '21 at 13:22

2 Answers2

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As for track name etc, you'll want to require emms-info and one or more of the emms-info-* modules (emms-info-mp3info, emms-info-ogginfo etc), and also make sure that the corresponding command line tools are installed (see if you can run mp3info in the terminal). Then add emms-info-initialize-track to emms-track-initialize-functions. (The setup function emms-standard attempts to do all of this for you.)

legoscia
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The key command here is emms-play-playlist which is one of a whole family of such commands: see this question for more.

Fran Burstall
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