For a long time I've looked for a better music player for the desktop. After a while I got tired of how slow graphical music players got when running on this ~20k songs library. At the end I returned to the command line and couldn't be happier.

My most-used command for playing music is now:

$ find /mnt/nfs/media/MP3 ! -path "*/MP3/Hoerspiele/*" -type f | \
    sort -R | while read a; do mpg123 -v "$a"; done

Unknown files (e.g. cover pictures) are just skipped and I can even ^C to skip a song or pause with ^Z. That's all I really wanted :-) I'ts even possible to skip the intro for a certain radio show:

$ mpg123 -k 2000 [...]

On MacOS X, sort doesn't support "-R" and we can use Perl for this:

$ find /mnt/nfs/media/MP3 -type f | tail -30 | \
    perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle(<STDIN>);' | \
    while read a; do afplay -d "$a"; done