Jam: Listen To Google Play Music From The Console

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about GPMDP, a Google Play Music desktop application that integrates Google Play Music with the desktop and adds various features on top. If you don't need all those desktop features and all you need is a lightweight, console Google Play Music client, you can try Jam.

Jam is a new Google Play Music console player for Linux and Windows. The application, which is written in Go, had its first alpha release about two weeks ago, and it's currently at version 0.4.0.

Jam features a console interface very similar to that of Cmus, with easy keyboard navigation. While the interface is easy to use, it currently lacks a help screen, so for a list of keyboard shortcuts, see the Jam GitHub page.

Jam features:

• console interface inspired by Cmus;
• Last.fm scrobbling (use the "-lastfm" flag);
• play, pause (this is buggy), stop, previous / next track;
• populates a local database with the artists and albums you saved through the web interface (or by any other means) and allows searching artists in this database.

Jam is still very new, so it lacks a few features, but its developer hopes to improve it further, by making its interface detachable like MOC or to allow controlling the playback via command line arguments. If there's some feature you'd like to see in Jam, you can submit a bug report.

It's important to mention for Jam to work, you need to login using the same account used for Google Music on your mobile device. Without this, you will get a "no valid devices" error when trying to login with Jam.

If you use the Google two-factor authentication, you'll need to generate an app password for Jam. You can do this by visiting THIS link.

Download Jam (64bit binary)

Download Jam (64bit binaries are available for Linux and Windows)

To install the 64bit binary on Linux, download it from GitHub (it's the first one, called "jam_x64") and place it in your home folder. Then to install it to /usr/local/bin/ (so it's available in your PATH), use the following command:

sudo install jam_x64 /usr/local/bin/jam

How to install Jam from source

Note: the instructions below were tested on Ubuntu 16.04+ / Linux Mint 18.x and may not work on older Ubuntu versions (golang-go may be too old).

To install Jam from source, you'll need Go, Git and libpulse-dev. Install these in Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint using the following command:

sudo apt install golang-go git libpulse-dev

Next, you'll need to set the GOPATH environment variable and make the GOPATH/bin folder available in your PATH. To do this (and use ~/.go as GOPATH), use the commands below:

mkdir ~/.go
echo "export GOPATH=\$HOME/.go" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PATH=\$PATH:\$GOROOT/bin:\$GOPATH/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

And finally, install Jam from source (the binary will be available in ~/.go/bin/) using the following command:

go get github.com/budkin/jam

If you encounter bugs, report them @ GitHub.