A simple ivy interface to emms.

This package requires emms and ivy.

If you want to act on marked candidates, you need a recent version of ivy (MELPA version 20200613.1920 or better).

(package-install 'ivy-emms)

or

(use-package ivy-emms
  :ensure t)

Download ivy-emms.el, put it somewhere in your load-path and then do either:

(require 'ivy-emms)

or

(autoload 'ivy-emms "ivy-emms" nil t)

First make sure that emms is working to your satisfaction and knows about your music collection.

Do M-x ivy-emms to see a formatted list of tracks to choose from.

Hit RET to play the chosen track.

Mark several tracks and hit RET to play the first track and queue the rest in the current playlist.

Warning: Either action will wipe the current EMMS playlist. See below for alternatives.

Hit M-o (ivy-dispatching-done) to choose and apply alternate actions. Currently these are:

Call ivy-emms with a prefix argument C-u M-x ivy-emms to rebuild the track list. Useful if you add new music to EMMS after loading ivy-emms.

You can change the default action for single tracks (what ivy-emms does when you hit RET) with:

(setq ivy-emms-default-action #'ivy-emms-add-track)

You can also change the default multi-action (for when you have marked some tracks and then hit RET) with something like:

(setq ivy-emms-default-multi-action #'ivy-emms-play-next-multi)

Here are all the possibilities:

There is no multi-action needed for ivy-emms-add-track because the default behaviour of ivy is to call the single track action on each marked candidate in turn which is The Right Thing.

You can change the appearance of the track-list by writing your own function to generate it:

(setq ivy-emms-make-item-function #'my-amazing-make-item)

Your function should take a string as argument (a key in the emms-cache-db hash-table) and return a cons cell with your formatted search term as car and the string as cdr.

Have a look at ivy-emms-simple-make-item for ideas to get started.

This package owes a clear intellectual debt to helm-emms and also to ivy-bitex from which I learned how to work with ivy.