Johnny Matthews | How to Update your CMUS Library

CMUS is a fantastically simple music player for Unix systems. It just runs in the terminal and requires hardly any memory to run! This low memory requirement is actually why I go onto using it in the first place. Between Chrome, Slack, and VSCode, I don’t have much memory left to go around in my 8gb MacBook. This was written on 9th of May 2018.

I often find myself updating my music library, which can cause CMUS to go out sync. So I began looking for a solution to help me update the CMUS cache on the fly! I found a post on Github by c0llision that guided me to the script below!

All it does is bind a few commands to the u key in CMUS. So every time you need to update your CMUS library, just press the u key on your keyboard!

  1. Create the following file:

    #!/bin/bash
cmus-remote -C clear
cmus-remote -C "add ~/Music"
cmus-remote -C "update-cache -f"

  2. Name it update-library.sh and save it somewhere. I’ve saved mine at ~/Applications/cmus-osx directory.

  3. Change the permissions to make the script executable:

    chmod +x ~/Applications/cmus-osx/update-library.sh

  4. Open CMUS:

    cmus

  5. Enter the following within CMUS to bind the update script to the u key:

    :bind -f common u shell ~/Applications/cmus-osx/update-library.sh

  6. There you go! You can new press the u key to update your entire library when within CMUS.