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 is installed, edit the /etc/mpd.conf file as a superuser. Each setting is extensively described there. Just follow common sense. In doubt, consult The Music Player Daemon - User's Manual.

Some popular configuration options are described in sections bellow.

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

Built-in HTTP streaming server
Since version 0.15 there is a built-in HTTP streaming daemon/server that comes with MPD. To activate this server simply set it as output device.

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

Command-line

 * – CLI client, the most basic functionality available (useful for key-bindings)
 * - A command-line concept fork of ncmpc written in C++

Extras

 * – 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