Inside Out
Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software

MPD : Command Line MP3 Player

ℹ️ Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a command line interface-based mp3 player that supports various audio file formats and can be controlled from another computer over LAN, with a web browser or using graphical clients. It has low memory footprint and creates a database of songs for faster performance. Packages are available for SuSE through the Packman repositories.

Here comes the next article in Command Line series. In the last article↗ i had talked about a CLI (Command Line Interface) based Instant Messaging client. So lets move on to mp3’s with Music Player Daemon…

Why Music Player Daemon ?

- Supports widely used audio file formats (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, MOD, Wav) 
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  • Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a mp3 player based on the client server architecture which will let you control the music you play from another computer over a LAN or with a web browser or using graphical client or console based client in the same computer. The full list of available clients is here↗

  • There is support for Audioscrobbler↗ which you can get through addons (MPDScribble↗ or scmpc↗ or lastfmsubmitd↗)

  • Low memory footprint and it should be faster as it creates a database of songs rather than reading from the Filesystem.

For SuSE the packages are available from the Packman repositories. Here are the direct links to the rpm’s :

Music Player Daemon

Music Player Client for CLI (MPC)

If you are a Last.fm fan, there are several addons for mpd which will submit your songs to last.fm : [MPDScribble](http://www.frob.nl/scribble.html) or [scmpc](http://developer.berlios.de/projects/scmpc/) or [lastfmsubmitd](http://www.red-bean.com/%7Edecklin/software/lastfmsubmitd/)

After lots of struggle in compiling the above mentioned last.fm related addons i decided to stay with MPDScribble (When i tried to build each of them from source i got some really cool errors like : libsoup2.2 existing in my system and still ./configure reports i don’t have the library !!@#) Well to end my misery i got a nice MPDScrobble rpm :D Get the rpm here↗ (its a bit old though version 0.2.7 ; latest is 0.2.10)

To setup MPDScribble first create a directory

mkdir ~/.mpdscribble

Now create the configuration file : *\~/.mpdscribble/mpdscribble.conf* with the following parameters

username = "lastfm_username"

password = “md5sum of lastfm password”

To get the md5sum of your password :

echo -n "your_lastfm_password" | md5sum > some_file

Now copy the contents of *some\_file* to the password field in *\~/.mpdscrobble/mpdscrobble.conf*. That should set you with a nice commandline based mp3 player with audioscrobbler support :)

technorati tags:mpd↗, mpdscrobble↗, audioscrobbler↗, commandline↗, cli↗, mp3↗, last.fm↗, music↗, player↗, audio↗, linux↗