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Are there any reasonable alternatives to MPD (music player daemon) as a remotely controlled music player? It should be controllable over the network and not require X server to run.

Giacomo1968
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Saulius Žemaitaitis
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10 Answers10

7

xmms2 is a great alternative.

From the webpage:

Client-server model

  • Allows XMMS2 to have various multiple interfaces (as clients).
    • Command line interfaces
    • GTK clients (matching GNOME & Xfce4 look and feel)
    • KDE clients (matching KDE look and feel)
  • Network transparency means you can run and control XMMS2 remotely, (e.g. run XMMS2 on your 'media box' and control it over network using a bluetooth-enabled PDA (TCP) - see Mobile platforms)
cschol
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5

Groove Basin is a competitor to MPD. It even supports the MPD protocol in addition to its own (better) protocol. It has built-in loudness scanning, file system watching, Last.fm scrobbling, Auto-DJ, tag-editing, and streaming support. It comes with a web-based interface which you can choose to use if you like (see screenshot).

Online Demo

Screenshot: Screenshot

Getting started on Ubuntu

You can install groovebasin on Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install groovebasin

Then create a symlink from ~/music to your own music folder:

ln -s -T $PATH_TO_OWN_MUSIC_FOLDER ~/music

Then start it:

groovebasin &

Then access it from a web browser at 127.0.0.1:16242

loxaxs
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andrewrk
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1

I'm not recommending this, as I haven't tried it, but pita is a command-line client-server music player.

Update: According to the developer, it's meant to do much the same thing as MPD, and is not actively maintained. Also, it's Python instead of C, which is easier to extend, etc. They "definitely try to solve the same problems in much the same way".

endolith
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1

I haven't tried this, either, but Audacious can be run headless and controlled by clients. Wikipedia

endolith
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1

I also really really like Ampache.

Joshua K
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1

MythTV has also served me extremely well.

Joshua K
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1

deejayd is another option, that was born of shortcomings in MPD and XMMS2. It's only got a few clients at the moment, a command-line one and a web interface. It's written in Python with GStreamer or Xine for media decoding, and uses JSON-RPC as the message format.

TRS-80
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1

Not sure if you knew this, but the latest MPD has support for libinotify, which apparently updates the DB automatically.

freedrull
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0

You may be able to use the Squeezebox Server software to meet this need. It's basically a set of Perl scripts, so it runs anywhere without needing a GUI, and it's not necessary to have the Squeezebox hardware to use it. It exports a web interface and a HTTP MP3 stream, and there's also a variety of clients for different platforms that have some of the features you've described.

Handyman5
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0

You're looking for mpd. Just with better clients.

freedrull mentioned it now has support for libinotify (which I am unaware of). I've seen cool scripts based on using the inotify "cron" daemon, to auto-run mpd update when the filesystem changes.

Tag editing is also dependant on the mpd client app. I've found that ncmpcpp does a good job of editing tags and handling playlists.

qedi
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