Console Junkie: Installing MPD and grooving away to glory!

What is MPD?

Quoting from this article:

Music Player Daemon (MPD) allows remote access for playing music (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files) and managing playlists. MPD is designed for integrating a computer into a stereo system that provides control for music playback over a local network. It is also makes a great desktop music player, especially if you are a console junkie, like frontend options, or restart X often.

In this post, I’ll be explaining how to get MPD up and running on Ubuntu (9.04). If you are working on some other platform, you can simply compile from source wherever applicable. Also, this post is mainly about using mpd as a desktop music player. The configuration part of it is common across distributions. So lets get started!

First, we need to install mpd.

sudo apt-get install mpd

Let us now configure it and get it up and running. You can either directly configure mpd for system-wide usage (/etc/mpd.conf) or you can configure it on a per user basis (~/.mpdconf).

sudo cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.mpdconf

Before we edit our .mpdconf file, we need to create a few directories.

mkdir -p ~/.mpd/playlists