MPD
Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol. For more information, read about what mpd is and is not.
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Installation
Following minimal USE flags set is needed to be able to play most known audio file formats, and to listen to audio streams. For more features review the USE flags.
| USE flag | Default | Recommended | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| alsa | No | Yes | Adds support for media-libs/alsa-lib (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) |
| curl | No | Yes | Support for web stream listening |
| flac | No | Yes | Adds support for FLAC: Free Lossless Audio Codec |
| id3tag | No | Yes | Support for ID3 tags |
| mad | No | Yes | Adds support for mad (high-quality mp3 decoder library and cli frontend) |
| ogg | No | Yes | Adds support for the Ogg container format (commonly used by Vorbis, Theora and flac) |
| sqlite | No | Yes | Adds support for sqlite - embedded sql database |
| unicode | No | Yes | Adds support for Unicode |
| vorbis | No | Yes | Adds support for the OggVorbis audio codec |
| wavpack | No | Yes | Add support for wavpack audio compression tools |
root # emerge --ask --verbose media-sound/mpdMake sure MPD is configured before first run. If ready, MPD can be added to default runlevel and started:
root # rc-update add mpd defaultroot # /etc/init.d/mpd startConfiguration
After finished installation MPD should be working with the gentoo shipped default configuration. Below a example of a simple configuration:
music_directory "/var/lib/mpd/music"
playlist_directory "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
db_file "/var/lib/mpd/database"
log_file "/var/lib/mpd/log"
state_file "/var/lib/mpd/state"
user "mpd"
bind_to_address "localhost"
bind_to_address "/var/lib/mpd/socket"
input {
plugin "curl"
}At this point MPD should be able to run as a system daemon with its own user called mpd, which is the default setting of MPD.
Additional configuration options are described in sections below.
PulseAudio
Build MPD with pulseaudio USE flag and add dedicated audio_output:
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "Pulse Output"
mixer_control "Master"
}It may be a good practice to run both PulseAudio and MPD under X11 user instead.
Built-in HTTP streaming server
Build MPD with network USE flag and add dedicated audio_output to /etc/mpd.conf
audio_output {
type "httpd"
name "HTTP Stream"
encoder "vorbis" # optional, vorbis(OGG) or lame(MP3)
port "8000"
bitrate "192" # do not define if quality is defined
format "44100:16:1"
}
bind_to_address "0.0.0.0"Replace localhost with 0.0.0.0 or a specific interface IP. Bind to address 0.0.0.0 means here: stream on all local found IP interfaces. You could change it to a specific interface IP address like f.e. 192.168.1.2 then the streaming server is bound to that interface IP only.
Running as a specific user
Sometimes it may be handy to run MPD as a specific user.
Start with copying /etc/mpd.conf to ~/.mpdconf. There are some changes that you will have to change in order to run MPD as a user, most importantly user and group, also make sure the various path settings are correct:
user "my-user" group "my-group"
Make sure your user has read access to the directory you specify in music_directory.
Clients
Command-line
- media-sound/mpc - A commandline client for Music Player Daemon (media-sound/mpd) (useful for key-bindings)
- media-sound/ncmpc - A ncurses client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD)
- media-sound/ncmpcpp - ncurses mpd client, ncmpc clone with some new features, written in C++
Extras
- media-sound/mpdscribble – An MPD client that submits information to Audioscrobbler-compatible service (eg. libre.fm or last.fm)
Troubleshooting
For general troubleshooting refer to the excellent MPD troubleshooting section
