Music Player Daemon

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Music Player Daemon
Developed by	Warren Dukes
Initial release	?
Stable release	0.13.1 (2008-01-28) _[+/−]
Preview release	none (none) _[+/−]
Written in	C
OS	Unix-like
Genre	Audio player
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.musicpd.org

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a music player which allows for remote access from another computer. An example is a headless computer running MPD and using one of the available front ends to control it remotely. It also makes for a good media player for desktop computers, particularly if the user either does not use or frequently restarts X.

MPD does not stream audio; all playback occurs on the server where the music files are located. The remote client controls playback from a nearby location.

MPD uses a text file as a database in which to maintain the basic music file information when it is not running. Once the daemon is started, the database is kept completely in-memory and no hard disk access is necessary to look up or search for a song. This database does not allow files to be added or played from arbitrary locations; music files must be below the music root directory and are only added to the database when the update command is sent to the server.

1 Features
2 Clients
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Features

Plays Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, OggFLAC, MP2, MP3, MP4/AAC, MOD, Musepack and wave files
Remotely control MPD over a network (IPv4 and IPv6 supported)
Play FLAC, OggFLAC, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis HTTP streams
Reads and caches metadata information (ID3 (id3v1 and id3v2)), Vorbis Comments, and MP4 Metadata.
Metadata information can be searched
Buffer support for playback (prevents skipping due to high load or network latency)
Gapless playback
Crossfading support
Seeking support
Save, load, and manage playlists (in m3u format)
Volume control (OSS, ALSA, and software mixers)
Native Zeroconf support
libsamplerate and native sample rate conversion
Native support for ALSA, OSS, MVP, JACK, Mac OS X, PulseAudio
Minimal hardware requirements
Tested on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and HP-UX
Can be used as a source for an Icecast stream, in Ogg Vorbis.

[edit] Clients

MPD has a variety of front-ends which communicate with the server using a custom protocol^[1] over a TCP connection. One example is Sonata Music Player, which provides a graphical user interface for playing files and managing playlists.^[2]