This chapter demonstrates how to setup EMMS so that you can start listening to your music without having to read all of the documentation first.
The first thing you have to do is telling Emacs where the sources of EMMS are located. Let's say you have them in ~/elisp/emms/. So add this line to your .emacs.
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp/emms/lisp/")
Further informations about installing EMMS can be found in the installation chapter, See Installation.
Let's say you want to enable all features which are considered stable by
the EMMS developers. To achieve this you invoke the emms-all
setup function by adding the following three lines to your .emacs.
(require 'emms-setup)
(emms-all)
(emms-default-players)
The function emms-default-players in the last line sets up the
list of default players. The list contains lightweight specialized
players like ogg123 or mpg321 and we-play-everything-players like
mplayer or xine. To be sure that emms can play all your music you should
check that the needed players are installed.
Further informations about the several setup scripts can be found in the simple setup chapter, See Simple Setup.
Of course EMMS tries to display the tags of the music files you listen to. For this to work you have to make sure that the appropriate programs are installed. For mp3 files you need `mp3info', and for ogg files you need `ogginfo'.
The last thing to do is to tell EMMS the root directory of our music collection. Let's say all your music is in ~/Music or in subdirectories thereof.
(setq emms-source-file-default-directory "~/Music/")
OK, now we've set up EMMS. Reload your .emacs or restart Emacs to let the changes have an effect.
Now we will add all our music to a playlist by invoking M-x emms-add-directory-tree RET ~/Music/ RET. We do this because then EMMS will read the tags of all your music files and cache them. This is required for the browser, See The Browser.
To switch to the playlist buffer, invoke M-x emms-playlist-mode-go or simply M-x emms. You can see that most tracks are displayed with their file name, but track by track the filename gets replaced with the artist and track name of the file's tag.
Hit RET on a track to start playback.
Now you can start exploring EMMS. It's probably best to begin with the basic commands (see Basic Commands), the interactive playlists (see Interactive Playlists), and the browser (see The Browser).