Music Player Daemon

The Music Player Daemon is a really net audio player which runs in the background and accepts commands from a (remote) front-end. It features a music database and a playlist and can be controlled by a variety of front-ends, including web-frontends, console apps and GUI's.

The idea

The idea is that you can make a very light dedicated box which is connected to your stereo, or just run the daemon locally, and then control the player from any compatible front-end from a remote system. There are web, console and GUI programs for controlling the MPD.

Features

It's features include:

• A music database
• Playlist
• Optional logging
• Optional password protection
• Multiple audio outputs
  • Icecast (network streaming)
  • ALSA
  • OSS
• On the fly volume normalization
• Proxy and buffering when playing remote streams

Drawbacks

You have to configure a "music" directory in /etc/mpd.conf where all your music is stored. This has to be readable to the user the daemon is running as (usually mpd). The obvious drawback is that mpd doesn't allow you to place some files in /foo/here and other in /bar/there.

-- WRONG -- it actually does, all you have to do is place SYMLINKS in the configured directory that lead to the actual music!

ln -s <target> <linkname>

e.g.: ln -s /home/yourmomma/Music/ yourmommaMusic

after that just refresh your database

Front-ends

There are numerous good front-end programs which allow you to control MPD.

GMPC seems to be the obvious choice. We realize the arrogance of this statement and feel compelled to mention that Sonata is a good alternative.

Links

• Official website: http://www.musicpd.org/

Music Player Daemon

Cli

• Music Player Command

Graphical clients

Sonata	GNOME	8
KMP	KDE	5
Gnome Music Player Client	GNOME	5
Glurp	GTK+-2.x	1

Multimedia

HOWTO	Players	Rippers and Converters
Howto work with audio and video formats using command-line tools.Audio formats HOWTO Convert audio files HOWTO Dump audio streams from the Internet HOWTO Dump audio streams from a video file Video formats HOWTO Convert video files HOWTO Make a video DVD HOWTO Make a video (S)VCD HOWTO Dump video streams from the Internet	Xine Totem MPlayer GMPlayer KMPlayer Audio (only) players: Music Player Daemon	Video DVD rippers Dvd::rip - DVD ripper and encoder Avidemux2 Video downloaders youtube-dl (Fetches Youtube.com videos) Audio CD rippers KAudioCreator Ogg Theora encoders: Ffmpeg2theora