Introduction

Venturous is a random playback manager, which uses media player's command line interface. Currently only Audacious media player is supported, but adding support for other players should be quite simple.

Venturous is built around one feature, which is missing from most (maybe even all) media players: user-defined items for random playback. This feature is especially useful for grouping separate tracks that are actually parts of one composition. For example parts of classical music compositions (movements) are often distributed as separate tracks - either separate audio files or separate entries in the cue file. It is usually desirable to listen to the movements in succession and in a proper order.

Venturous has a hierarchical playlist, which reflects a file system. The playlist is protected from accidental changes.
Venturous also features playback history, which allows user to identify previously played items and play them again.
Custom actions similar to those in Thunar file manager are available in playlist's and history's context menus. Custom actions allow user to open selected items in external application. For example: open in file manager or in media player, edit text file, move item(s) to trash.

Build requirements

GNU/Linux or MS Windows (might also work in other systems - not tested).

External dependencies

• git
• wget OR curl OR inkscape
• cmake (2.8 or later)
• make
• g++ (4.7 or later) [recent versions of clang++ also suffice but only with qt5]
• qt4 OR qt5 development libraries (Core, XML and GUI/Widgets modules)

How to build and install

1. Clone this repository, e.g.:

    git clone https://github.com/vedgy/venturous.git
   

2. Enter newly created directory, e.g.:

    cd venturous
   

3. If you want to install the latest stable version, execute the following command:

    git checkout tags/v1.4
   

If you prefer the latest development version (can be unstable), just skip this step.

4. Run configuration script:

    ./update_submodules_and_configure
   

5. Follow instructions that appear at the end of update_submodules_and_configure output.

Troubleshooting

If errors appear after running update_submodules_and_configure, ensure that all build dependencies are satisfied.

Errors also appear in the following case:

• Neither wget nor curl is installed. If you have inkscape installed and want to use it for icon generation, pass generate-png argument to update_submodules_and_configure.

Runtime requirements

• qt4 OR qt5 shared libraries (Core, XML and GUI/Widgets modules).
• Audacious (managed Audacious mode in Venturous - which is not the default mode - requires Audacious 3.4 or later).
• audacious and audtool executables must be present in PATH. There are two problems with this requirement in MS Windows:
  • Audacious bin directory is not added in PATH environment variable automatically. User has to manually add it there.
  • audtool is usually unavailable in Windows at all. With audtool missing only basic Venturous features work. The biggest problem is that stopping playback does not work in this case, which prevents Venturous from normal functioning.
• notify-send from libnotify (optional - for desktop notifications).
• xdg-open from xdg-utils (optional - for some default custom actions on non-MS-Windows systems).
• Song Change Audacious plugin (optional - for detached Audacious mode, which is the default mode). This plugin is usually unavailable in MS Windows, so Windows users have to switch to the managed mode.

How to uninstall

Enter venturous/build directory, acquire root privileges (sudo or su) and run

xargs rm < install_manifest.txt

License

Copyright (C) 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019 Igor Kushnir

Venturous is licensed under the GNU GPLv3+ license, a copy of which can be found in the COPYING file.

Venturous is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Venturous is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Venturous. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.