Music Player Daemon

If you are looking for simplicity and exceptional sound quality, go with MPD. Sonic signature that can be associated with MPD includes:

• pin-point accuracy
• very detailed
• very transparent
• heart pounding attack
• exceptional attack speed

To put in another way - MPD delivers absolute precision when playing back. MPD will tell you a lot about the recording itself. If your audio system is up to it, MPD will turn you into a super bat! You'd pick up the tiniest noise in the recording, details you have never heard before, minute details you may never realise it's there until now.

Agent Kith

What is MPD?

Short for Music Player Daemon, MPD is a very lightweight player that can run on the slowest computer you have kept unused in the shed/storeroom.

MPD handles both music management and playback and does not require a secondary client to work. MPD is designed to run from a headless computer. In other words, you are running MPD off a computer that is not connected to a keyboard or a mouse.

Useful links

User manual

https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user.html#

Forum

https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/discussions

Tips

Controlling MPD

MPD can be controlled using web interfaces, client software and phone apps.  myMPD is a standalone and lightweight web-based MPD client which is included in SnakeOil. MPDroid is a free open sourced Android App.  While it is reasonably user friendly, but there is no documentation and may no longer be developed? 

MAFA is arguably the best paid Android app. It is rich in features and user friendly, and actively developed.  As well as supporting album art in folders, MAFA can also read embedded album art.  MAFA first tries to get cover art file from the directory of the first album track. If that file was not found it will try to get embedded image from the first album track.  MAFA is ideal for people who are migrating to MPD and have yet to set up their folder art.

A list of all MPD controls is available here. 

myMPD setup

Setting up album art

A common problem with MPD is album art is not supported. To work around this limitation - cover art is supported via the Snakeoil OS Web server instead. To get this to work you need to create JPG file for each folder. Unfortunately this means your albums have to be organised in folder logic (i.e. songs from the same album has to be organised in one folder, and in this folder a JPG covert art).

The covert art file is commonly named folder.jpg (and is case sensitive). This is an example of MPDroid displaying the cover art using this method:
 

To set this up in MPDroid, go to Settings → Cover art settings. Tick the option 'Download local cover art' to enable two options, 'Path to music' and 'Covert filename'.

Once the checkbox is set, tap 'Path to music' and set it like so, replace [ip_address] with the the IP address of your Snakeoil machine:

Once you have make this settings, exit the settings and go back to MPDroid playback. Your cover art should start to appear.

You can use this same idea to configure other MPD clients to use the local cover art. There are more advanced MPD clients with the ability to query the Internet to download the cover art. Unfortunately querying the Internet can be hit and miss (false results). Where possible use a local cover art.