Mpd + ncmpc - perfect combo for iTunes replacement - Tuan Anh Tran

http://tuananh.us/articles/mpd-and-ncmpc-perfect-combo-for-itunes-replacement/

by tuananh • 15 years ago

40 24 15 years ago

RexRollman• 15 years ago

Love MPD/ncmpc (it is probably my favorite music player outside of Foobar2000). I use it on my Arch Linux box and it runs like a champ. I also use plain old mpc as well, with some shortcuts defined in my .ratpoisonrc

_delirium2• 15 years ago

I used to use MPD on Linux and really liked it, and just recently realized that it's possible to use on OSX as well. I somewhat prefer the ncmpcpp client to ncmpc, but ncmpc is fine too.

On that note, I also like that I can switch interfaces (even CLI to GUI) without having to switch to a completely different piece of music-library-management software, thanks to the client/server design. I even use different clients for different things; for example, the simple CLI client 'mpc' is good for using in scripts.

lclarkmichalek• 15 years ago

ncmpcpp is an awesome player, though sometimes I do wish that I could have a full featured GUI brower like amarok plug into the mpd backend. Are there any good Qt based interfaces?

_delirium2• 15 years ago

I used Ario for a bit, which was fine, but I find I prefer ncmpcpp somehow. Ario's GTK, though: http://ario-player.sourceforge.net/

There seem to be about a dozen each of GTK and Qt frontends, but I'm not sure what proportion are really actively maintained / full-featured.

phaer• 15 years ago

There is a list of clients at the official mpd wiki sorted by interface, here are the qt based ones: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients#Qt

I personally use ncmpcc in terminals, Sonata as a gui interface and MPDroid on my phone.

thebrokencube• 15 years ago

I'm a huge fan of Sonata ( http://sonata.berlios.de/ ). While it isn't a Qt based interface, I've used it a bunch over the last couple of years and it functions great as a simple GUI frontend for mpd. Anyways, just my 2cents.

technomancy• 15 years ago

I wrote my own mpd client with dmenu and a few lines of shell:

https://github.com/technomancy/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/musi...

This lets you just type just enough letters to uniquely identify the album you want to play, then hit enter to queue it up. Yay Unix!

dbro• 15 years ago

Nice. I did too: https://github.com/dbro/muss . It's a shell script that coordinates mpc and dmenu. It's got two modes of operation, one for interactive browsing and another for a simple command line search. Some examples:

>muss elvis [queues up all songs that have "elvis" in the artist, album, or track name]

>muss elv pres not jailhouse

>muss lion rich -a -r ["Hello, is it me you're looking for?"]

-a means append to existing playlist, -r means randomize the playlist

>muss

when no arguments are provided, it opens up a very fast search/filter/browse interface using dmenu

Inspiration for this project were plait and the then-new instant search on Google.

Arcanum-XIII2• 15 years ago

The killer feature of itunes for me is the library management — I drag & drop the mp3's, if they're tagged correctly it will handle them at ease, auto organizing the directory and files and copying them at the right place. If some other tool can do this, even CLI ones, I would gladly hear about them !

klausa• 15 years ago

My iTunes does that just fine.

Arcanum-XIII2• 15 years ago

Yes, but library sharing with non iTunes/Apple box is no easy pie. Backup and transfer too are a pain in the ass - but well it is not like it happen everyday. And that without even speaking of his weight, which seem to grow with each minor version for no good reason. So while it is (for me) a good tool to organise and browse my library, it's limitation can be irritating, more often than not.

prsimp• 15 years ago

While it's not drag & drop, you should take a look at beets (http://beets.radbox.org/). It's written in Python and has fairly active development. It uses the MusicBrainz database for cataloging music and is pretty customizable as far as directory structure etc.

chanux• 15 years ago

I am using MoC (Music on Console - http://moc.daper.net) and really liking it (I'm on Linux). Thought of sharing so the people might like to see another possible option get to see it.

p4bl0• 15 years ago

I've been using MPD (+ mpc, ncmpcpp, ario) for a long time now (several years). There is one thing that I miss from my iTunes usage: the party mix. It was an awesome tool (at least back in iTunes v4 to v6) and I was really always in there.

Basically what I want is to be able to tell my player "randomly select songs in this playlist/folder/…" and then that it shows me at some place the last 5 or 10 songs played and the next 20 to play, and let me remove songs I don't wanna listen to right now from this "songs-to-play" list, and then refill the list up to 20 songs. This way I can repeat the operation a few times and know that I have at least an hour of aweome music to come.

I know I could script that up for MPD, even with just MPC and Bash (and Zenity for the cozyness), but I'm a lazy guy and I can almost reproduce the behavior with the shuffle command of MPD. You know, the worst ennemy of "great" is "good enough".

molecularbutter• 15 years ago

I agree, I'll sound like a freakshow but I actually like iTunes for playlists and its ability to share music libraries easily on a LAN.

pyre• 15 years ago

  its ability to share music libraries *only with other
  iTunes users* easily on a LAN

Fixed that for you.

_hnwo• 15 years ago

totally agree - same situation, mpd/mpc, various iphone/android clients to interface with mpd and really missing party mix / genius style stuff.

simcop2387• 15 years ago

I've actually got a script that I've made for doing that. I've been cleaning it up somewhat recently for doing a proper release. It lets you schedule things based off of any ICAL based calendar along with just a set of default playlists.

It's probably a little more obtuse and annoying than just the party mix thing in iTunes since I originally designed it for running a jukebox/micro FM station.

https://github.com/simcop2387/MediaSched

spatten• 15 years ago

Is there an non-iTunes equivalent to iTunes' Genius? Most of my music listening tends to be of the "I feel like listening to song X and a bunch more like it" and Genius is perfect for that.

If I could get that in a console app, I'd switch in a minute.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

amarok did that since forever using last.fm similarity data, but it isn't console app (scriptable via dbus but meh)

devin• 15 years ago

This is fantastic. Thank you for posting it. I plan to use MPD as an alternative to iTunes for the foreseeable future. The number of people clamoring for an alternative to iTunes seems to be growing. I hope Apple gets the message, I'm sick of needing three music players to handle my library.

otto• 15 years ago

I've used MoC, Mpd + ncmpc, and I am currently using cmus (http://cmus.sourceforge.net/).

Currently cmus has been my favorite. Just another option.

tizoc• 15 years ago

I have been happy with cmus[1] for years, both in Linux and OSX.

[1] http://cmus.sourceforge.net/

1010110101• 15 years ago

Short of writing your own scripts to control mplayer, mpd+ncmpc is the most simple and most reliable (most difficult to crash) open source UNIX-friendly music player solution I've ever used. And over the years I've systematically tried every player I could find inside the package/ports repositories and outside of them.

These days I just use scripts and mplayer. But for a ready-made solution, MPD fills the "simple and reliable" niche completely, in my opinion. On those two criteria it is without parallel.

On Windows, foobar2000 was great but the source was never available.

Mpd + ncmpc - perfect combo for iTunes replacement - Tuan Anh Tran

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