mpd – Music Player Daemon
Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a music player which allows for remote access from another computer. An example is a headless computer running MPD and using one of the available front ends to control it remotely. It also makes for a good media player for desktop computers, particularly if the user either does not use or frequently restarts X.
MPD does not stream audio; all playback occurs on the server where the music files are located. The remote client controls playback from a nearby location.
MPD uses a text file as a database in which to maintain the basic music file information when it is not running. Once the daemon is started, the database is kept completely in-memory and no hard disk access is necessary to look up or search for a song. This database does not allow arbitrary files to be added; music files must be above the music root directory and are only added to the database when the update command is sent to the server.
Install:
Edit config file/etc/mpd.conf:
music_directory "~/music"
playlist_directory "~/.mpd/playlists"
db_file "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "/var/log/mpd/mpd.log"
error_file "/var/log/mpd/mpd.error"
user "mpd"
bind_to_address "192.168.0.254" #only private interface
Create dir and set own:
chown -R mpd ~/music
Create DB:
mpd --create-db
Add all music to playlist and… play:
mpc add /
mpc play
References
- mpd –create-db
- This will start the daemon. The ‘–create-db’ argument will read the contents of the root music directory and add the Music files to a text database. You should see the list of files being added into the DB. This may take some time to complete – based on size of your music collection.
- mpc update
- The command used here is ‘mpc’ – not ‘mpd’. We are using a command line client now. This command scans the root music directory for updates.
- mpc add /
- This command will add all the files in the music directory to the current playlist. Please note that the ‘/’ here means root music directory – and not the global linux root.
- mpc play
- This will start playing the files in the current playlist.
