emms

EMMS stands for Emacs Multimedia System, a media player front-end for the GNU Emacs editor. It enables playback of audio and video within Emacs by delegating actual media playback to external programs, while providing a unified interface for control and organization inside Emacs.

EMMS supports managing playlists, browsing a library, tagging and searching tracks, and streaming Internet radio. It integrates with Emacs buffers and the mode line, allowing users to add files to playlists, start and stop playback, and navigate tracks using standard Emacs commands and key bindings. It can display track information such as title, artist, and duration, and can manage metadata through EMMS’s tagging features. It also supports different playback backends via separate Emacs Lisp modules.

The architecture consists of a core EMMS framework written in Emacs Lisp, plus a set of backend modules for external players such as MPlayer, VLC, Xine, and MPV, as well as backends for MPD compatibility. The backends communicate with the external players and relay status and track information back to EMMS. EMMS sources allow users to describe collections of files, URLs, or streams, enabling streaming and offline playback.

EMMS has been developed and maintained within the Emacs community since the early 2000s and is distributed as free/open-source software. It remains popular among users who want to control multimedia from within Emacs and to leverage Emacs’ scripting capabilities to customize playback workflows.