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MPD

Contents

https://www.musicpd.org/

Getting the service running

At one time, mpd was installed broken on Ubuntu. As of 20.04, it's set up pretty well by default. I don't know when this was fixed.

On Ubuntu 20.04, by default mpd is set up to run as a system service, so that's good. And the default /etc/mpd.conf file tells it to drop root privileges and run as the mpd user.

As a system service, it's much easier to use ALSA for output than Pulseaudio, and the default configuration does that.

To use ALSA, the mpd user has to belong to the audio group, and it does.

One thing I'll change in /etc/mpd.conf is to listen either on all interfaces, or at least some besides localhost, so I can control it from other systems.

The default configuration uses the default ALSA hardware device. If that's not what you want, you can see https://www.musicpd.org/doc/html/plugins.html#alsa-plugin and use aplay -L to get a list of all the possible values for device. E.g. hw:CARD=PCH,DEV=3.

MPC client

Doc: https://www.musicpd.org/doc/mpc/html/

Playlist commands

Important

To play anything, you must first get it into the current playlist. Even if you just want to play one thing.

Commands for the playlist - unless otherwise specified, these operate on the current playlist:

playlist
List the playlist
clear
Empty the playlist (stops playing if anything was playing)
crop
Delete all playlist entries except the one currently playing
del <number>
Delete one item from the playlist; 0 means the currently playing item, otherwise items are numbered starting at 1. (To see playlist with numbers, try mpc playlist | cat -n. There's probably a better way.)
add <file>
Add an item from the database to the current playlist, at the end. <file> should be a path to the item, as shown by "mpc ls".
insert <file>
Like add, only it puts the item immediately after the currently playing item, so it'll play next. If random mode is enabled, it'll still be played next.
mv|move <from> <to>
Move item at position <from> to be at position <to>.
shuffle
Shuffle the items in the playlist

Commands for persistent playlists:

lsplaylists
List all saved playlists
playlist <playlist>
List items in playlist <playlist>
save <name>
Save current playlist with name <name>.
load <name>
Add contents of saved playlist named <name> to the current playlist. (You can use clear first to empty the current playlist.)
rm <name>
Delete database playlist named <name> from database.

Playing things

Status:

current
Show what's playing right now
playlist [-f <format>]
List songs in current playlist. See "man mpc" for format string syntax.

Control:

play [<position>]
Start playing the item at <position> in the playlist. Deafult is number 1.
pause
Pause playing
stop
Stop playing
next
Stop playing the current entry from the current playlist and start playing the next one.
prev
Reverse of next.

Playing a playlist from the music database with mpc

Suppose you have a playlist in the database already - e.g. a file "/var/lib/mpd/playlists/WCPE.m3u" that you've created earlier.

Now you want to play that playlist.

$ mpc clear
$ mpc lsplaylists
WUNC
WCPE
Favorites
$ mpc load WCPE
loading: WCPE
$ mpc play
volume: 96%   repeat: on    random: off   single: off   consume: off
loading: WCPE
http://audio-ogg.ibiblio.org:8000/wcpe.ogg
[playing] #1/1   0:00/0:00 (0%)
volume: 96%   repeat: on    random: off   single: off   consume: off