Music Player Daemon (MPD) OpenBSD Howto

[shep]

Music Player Daemon (MPD) OpenBSD Howto

MPD /audio/mpd is one of the lightest, most responsive methods to access mp3, ogg files and internet streams. Installation entails 2 components; the daemon and one of a number of front ends. On an older i386, playback of locally stored mp3's or internet music streams uses less than 2% of the cpu.

In OpenBSD, the /audio/mpd port has two flavors, the basic port and a flavor that enables the tremor integer decorder. The tremor option enhances performance on *ogg files at the expense of network streaming.

There are multiple front ends that function as traditional clients to the music player daemon. Clients can be command line, console, embedded, or GTK+, Qt or Java based gui's. Plugin interfaces ranging from a Firefox extensions, desktop specific controllers and emacs plugins are available. The clients also can control some aspects of the daemon.

In OpenBSD, configuration is easy, just edit /etc/mpd.conf to delineate where your music is stored.

music_directory                 "/home/user/music"

The port maintainers have set defaults for local users with the libao (sndio) backend. For Gnome3 users, libao will work in parallel with pulseaudio or /etc/mpd.conf can be edited to change mpd output from libao to pulseaudio.

The music files and the chain of directories all need to be executable. In OpenBSD, the executable directory chain is there by default when using /home/user/music. On initial startup and after any additions to the music folder, an update command will need to be run. Once the music directory is in place and configured in /etc/mpd.conf, add mpd to collection of package script daemons to be started in /etc/rc.conf.local. For example:

pkg_scripts="dbus_daemon avahi_daemon mpd"

Either reboot or run

/etc/rc.d/mpd -f start

as su/root to start the daemon.

I'll mention two mpd clients; audio/ncmpc and audio/sonata.

Ncmpc can be run in the console or in a terminal. With the setup described above you should see that it is connected to the localhost. Ctrl-U will start a music database update. The F1 key will show the help file, F2 the playlist and F3 will let you browse the music folder.
Internet music streams can be added in the F2 playlist panel with the 'a' key. The 'S' key will save the music stream url where it can be found in the F3 panel. Two of my favorite stream sources are:

http://audio-mpd.ibiblio.org:8000/wncw-128k

WNCW, an NPR station out of North Carolina
and

http://stream-tx1.radioparadise.com:80/mp3-128

Radio Paradise which is a commercial free station out of California. Ncmpc also supports lyrics but at the expense of increase bandwidth and cpu cycles.

Some example menu entries:
For those using xterm:

xterm -g 54x18 +sb -T "NcMpc Music" -e ncmpc

.
Alternative terminals that support changing title bar icons, such as /x11/rxvt-unicode can use

urxvt -g 54x18 +sb -icon /usr/local/share/pixmaps/music.png -T "NcMpc Music" -e ncmpc

after copying an icon to the file path specified. Those running a desktop environment that supports freedestop menu entries can use the following entry in /usr/local/share/applications/ncmpd.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=NcMpc
Comment=MPD Front end
Exec=xterm -g 54x18 +sb -T "NcMpc Music" -e ncmpc
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=music.png
Categories=GTK;AudioVideo;

An example music.png icon and a screenshot of ncmpc running in rxvt-unicode:

Sonata, /audio/sonata, provides the same functionality with a mouse pointer interface and a system tray icon. Internet streams are added and stored under the 'streams' tab. Album art is available in addition to lyrics for those with bandwidth and cpu cycles to burn.