Ayman Hourieh's Blog

I have used XMMS for my music playing needs since my first days with Linux, it looked and acted like Winamp, and back then this was more than enough for me, years passed, XMMS hardly improved, but I kept using it, recently I started looking for alternatives, although XMMS was doing its job, I thought there might be new features in the world of Linux music players that I was missing.

I looked around for alternatives, XMMS2 was in early development stages, and there were other Winamp-clones like beep media player, bmpx, and Audacious, those were out of question since I was looking for something different, I also found that amaroK has good reputation among KDE users, but this one was out of question too, given that I'm a Gnome user and want something that integrates nicely.

Next I came across Music Player Daemon (MPD) which got my interest, this application uses the client-server model, it is the backend of a music player, and has a variety of frontends to choose from, when I read about it I immediately thought I could make use of this in my home network, I have a 5.1 sound system connected to my workstation, to control XMMS when I'm on another machine, I ssh to the workstation and use the commandline switches of XMMS to play/pause or go to the next/previous item in the playlist, while this was usable, it wasn't very flexible, I also found a web-based XMMS control panel, but it wasn't very flexible either.

MPD's approach means that I can run the backend on my workstation, and one of the many frontends on other machines on the network, all will control the same backend as if running on my workstation.

Going through the client list, I found that MPD had many frontends, one for Gnome (gmpc), and two command-line versions (mpc, ncmpc) usable over SSH.

I decided to give this new and different way of playing music files a try, fortunately ebuilds for Gentoo were available, I only had to run
emerge mpd gmpc mpc ncmpc
to get everything installed, configuring MPD was a matter of editing /etc/mpd.conf.

Before starting mpd, I found out another cool feature, MPD indexes music files in a database instead of looking in the filesystem, this speeds up searching a lot for large collections of music files. Indexing is done by running mpd --create-db.

Finally, I started MPD and gmpc, tested it a bit, and then decided to use it instead of XMMS.

Happy end huh?