Experiencing Music

I just discovered a new companion (no, not an iPod), but the MPD – Music Player Daemon. This is the probably the first time I am feeling truly satisfied about my music player.

The MPD runs as a service. It binds to a port on your computer (6600 by default). Once you have the MPD up and running (you need to edit mpd.conf for one thing) you need to install (or write yourself) additional client software which talks to the daemon. Once such program is mpc.

mpc is essentially a console program. You need to set the MPD_HOST and MPD_PORT environmental before you start using it (unless you’ve really left everything to the defaults). So to first scan the directory you’ve set in mpd.conf as the root of music you need to run mpc update. This fetches the file names and the id3 tags to create a media library. Then you can search by running mpc search ANY some_term (hint – read the man-pages) to get a list of the songs which have some_term in any field. You may specifically search in the author field, in the title field among other things.

You run mpc add to add music to the playlist, mpc play to start playing it, mpc next to move to the next song and so on …

I have not tried this but it seems that in case you are on a network anyone on the network may stream music from your MPD server. However you do have access control – you may set a password and not allow the users who do not authenticate themselves with the password to, say, change the song. It is also reportedly easy to hook this up with IceCast to broadcast over HTTP.