Music is a big part of my workflow, and for the majority of it i use spotify, but sometimes its not enough, or some of the content that I want is not available on there and I have to buy and stream from Bandcamp. This is a tedious "solution", and yes spotify does support playing local files, but how about on systems that i've not installed spotify on?

I spend the majority of my workflow within an emacs buffer, and I looked into solutions to have Emacs control my downloaded music, and thats where I found EMMS.

Being an Emacs package, it's reasonably easy to install, however EMMS uses the mpd/mpc external programs to control and play music, Trying this a couple of months ago I actually gave up. Now however I think I have a repetable process.

1. Install mpd/mpc on your system, for me this was done like so.

   sudo apt update && \
       sudo apt install mpc mpd -y 
   

2. Next make the mpd files.

   ls ~/.mpd/
   

   database
   log
   mpd.conf
   mpd.db
   mpd.log
   mpd.pid
   pid
   playlists
   

3. Configure Pulse Audio in the ~/.mpd/mpd.conf file.

   audio_output {
   	type		"pulse"
   	name		"My Pulse Output"
   	server		"localhost"		# optional
   ##	sink		"remote_server_sink"	# optional
   }
   

   This page helped alot with the mpd/mpc side of things.

4. Install the emms package in Emacs

   (use-package emms
     :ensure t
     :config
     (require 'emms-setup)
     (emms-standard)
     (emms-default-players)
     (require 'emms-mode-line)
     (emms-mode-line 1)
     )
   

This is Emacs so the usage is whatever you want it to be, I personally doing M-x emms-play-directory RET works best for me, but EMMS has loads more features that I'm yet to discover.