Music Player Daemon rocks your net (Linux.com)

[Posted June 1, 2007 by ris]

Linux.com has a review of MPD, the Music Player Daemon. "Licensed under the GNU GPL, MPD has been available for several years, and is packaged for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. Debian, Ubuntu (using the universe repository), Mandriva, and Gentoo users can install the mpd package or ebuild. Fedora and openSUSE don't include MPD, but you can find unofficial RPMs for those distros online. To compile MPD from source, start at the install page on the MPD Wiki and follow the instructions for General Installing From Source."

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Music Player Daemon rocks your net (Linux.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2007 23:02 UTC (Fri) by edschofield (guest, #39993) [Link] (1 responses)

Ris, why did you quote the boring build instructions, rather than the first or second paragraph, which actually describe what this software does?

Music Player Daemon rocks your net (Linux.com)

Posted Jun 2, 2007 0:16 UTC (Sat) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I'm just happy the article skipped the boring "tar xzf ; configure ;
make ; make install" that Linux software reviews have always inexplicably
felt the need for.

Great program

Posted Jun 3, 2007 11:06 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

I know MPD thanks to LWN; it got so much praise from commenters that I gave it a try, and have always used it ever since. So let me do the same for others.

True to Unix philosophy, the daemon keeps running in the background even if the client crashes. There are a lot of different clients: Gnome has gmpc, KDE has Kanola (sadly not in Ubuntu), Xfce has a panel plugin, GNUstep has mpdcon.app, and then you have glurp, sonata, etc. For the command line you have several clients too (mpc, ncmpc), so you can use it for those boring "debug X configuration" sessions.

Plays WAV, MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis... And, it starts before you get your X prompt, and picks up right where it was when the machine shut down. Cool! With a few more codecs (Monkey's Audio and, ironically, Musepack MPC) it would be perfect.

Great program

Posted Jun 3, 2007 11:16 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Correction: Musepack is supported since 0.12.

Great program

Posted Jun 3, 2007 12:57 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

Why not just transcode your monkey's audio to flac? It's a nicer format, it's more free, and it's not like you have generational quality loss...

Great program

Posted Jun 3, 2007 14:39 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

It is a bit of a hassle when track information comes as a CUE file. I transcode them to MP3 thanks to this tutorial (in Spanish).