Linux Users Group Manipal

Some of the guys posted in the forums as to how to go about it, hence this post. Going by the list of available plugins to do the same it would seem a cakewalk. But it isn’t as you would be often stranded with a plugin that won’t support the media player you would be having. Trust me, I have had enough of these. So in this post I would explain how to install and configure mpd (music player daemon) on your system and do a lot more than you would have thought of. You would ask, why mpd? I would say its the most ultra light on system resources among all the music players I have used to date.

Install mpd using your package manager (apt for Debian or Ubuntu users, yum for fedora and so on). Now comes the part of configuring it. If you would run mpd as root, it would read the configuration files from /etc/mpd.conf or otherwise from ~/.mpdconf . You won’t need to make any big changes in the conf file other than the location of music directory. Open up the conf file in an editor and see the line that reads music_directory. Just change the directory to your audio collection. As you would notice, the conf file is commented and it says ‘You can put symlinks in here, if you like.‘ This is pretty useful if your collection is spread over multiple directories. You can always start it by typing mpd at the terminal and kill it using mpd –kill. Remember it would read the appropriate conf file depending on how you are starting the process i.e. as a normal user or as the root.

Note: Your home directory ~ may not contain a .mpdconf directory by default after mpd is installed. In that case create one and for an example conf file, copy the mpd.conf file from /etc/ to ~/.mpdconf

anomit@deadbox:~$ cp /etc/mpd.conf .mpdconf/


Now comes the part of installing a client that would interact with the daemon and play music for you. Install ncmpc, a ncurses based client for mpd using your package manager. Then just start it using ncmpc at the terminal. There is also a GTK+ based client called Sonata which would appeal to you if you are more of a GUI person.

If you would like your current track to be displayed in your pidgin status message and also scrobble to your last.fm account if you have one, install mpdscribble using your package manager and download music tracker, the plugin for pidgin from here.

Configuring mpdscribble
To configure it, you need to compute the md5sum of your last.fm account password. Execute the following at the terminal:

$ echo -n "your-password"|md5sum>file-name.txt
Get the md5sum value from the file and add the follwing lines in the /etc/mpdscribble.conf file

username = user-name
password = md5sum


Now just type mpdscribble at the terminal whenever you want the scrobbling service to start and press Ctrl+C to end it.

Installing musictracker plugin

Extract the contents of the file and cd to the directory where it has been extracted. Run the following commands to install it:

./configure
make
make install

Just check the plugins list in pidgin and enable the musictracker plugin. Configure it according to your wishes.

P.S. By default mpd runs on port 6600 on your system. Could someone try connecting to a running daemon using ncmpc from another laptop on your lan? The appropriate command would be:

ncmpc --host=ip-address --port=6600
where ip-adress would be of the system running the daemon.