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.

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.

Make sure MPD is configured before first run. If ready, MPD can be added to default runlevel and started:

Configuration
After finished installation MPD should be working with the gentoo shipped default configuration. Below a example of a simple configuration:

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.

Optional configuration steps are described in sections below.

PulseAudio
Build MPD with pulseaudio USE flag and add dedicated audio_output:

Built-in HTTP streaming server
Build MPD with network USE flag and add dedicated audio_output to /etc/mpd.conf

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:

Make sure your user has read access to the directory you specify in music_directory.

Clients

 * Sorted List of MPD clients

Commandline/Console

 * – A commandline client for Music Player Daemon (media-sound/mpd) (useful for key-bindings)
 * – A ncurses client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD)
 * – ncurses mpd client, ncmpc clone with some new features, written in C++
 * – An ncurses based mpd client with vi like key bindings

Scrobblers
Scrobblers are clients that submit to Audioscrobbler-compatible services (eg. libre.fm or last.fm)

Troubleshooting
For general troubleshooting refer to the excellent MPD troubleshooting section

External resources

 * Official Web Site and Wiki
 * MPD on Sourceforge
 * MPD Forum
 * MPD at Arch Wiki
 * The Music Player Daemon - User's Manual