In case you thought I was joking…

mplayer handles filesystem wildcards beautifully. This is playing anything by STP in any subfolder of my main “Music” directory. I use wildcards between words because it’s lazier than escaping the spaces.

Raktajino@laptop:~$ ssh rak@media-pc

rak@media-pc:~$ mplayer -shuffle /media/Music/*/Stone*Temple*Pilots*
MPlayer 1.5+svn38446-1build5 (Debian)
Playing Acoustics/Stone Temple Pilots - Plush (Acoustic).mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Plush
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: Simply Acoustic
 Track: 10
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A: 233.8 (03:53.7) of 234.0 (03:54.0)  4.5% 

Playing Rock/Stone Temple Pilots - Dead and Bloated.mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Dead & Bloated
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: The Best Of Stone Temple Pilot
 Track: 7
 Genre: Grunge
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A:   9.1 (09.1) of 310.0 (05:10.0)  4.5%