Rated 8.4/10 on freshmeat

m3u123 is a very minimalistic command line music player that uses XMMS I/O plugins to play music, independently of XMMS.

It evolved out of the need for a simple MP3 player that could handle .m3u playlists well. The first version I wrote was a simple shell script that wrapped the popular mpg123 utility. A few years later, the realization came that I could leverage existing support for various file formats and sound devices used by XMMS. So I whipped up a rather hackish solution for that, and posted it online for anyone else who was interested.

It has apparently since been useful enough to be included in a few Linux distributions, as a google search reveals. My only regret is that it doesn't have a catchier name.

The program is available under GNU General Public License:

• Version 0.6, updated sometime in 2006 (I haven't kept very good records, sorry)