The Music Player Dæmon and its Clients

This is the basic command-line interface to MPD. It is useful for basic scripting, such as using media keys to control the player, but I have a more advanced setup which I will explain later.

It does support one nice feature that none of the other clients I have looked at seem to be capable of: mpc single once. This enables single mode, which pauses the player after a track ends, but then disables it once the current track has stopped. I think I remember seeing this ‘stop at end of current song’ feature in another music player and loved it, so I still use mpc just for it.

Luke features this one heavily in his video, so I get the impression that it is probably the most popular. It has a visualiser, a tag editor (which I’ve found unreliable for some reason) and numerous other features. The feature of it that stands out most for me is the media library sorted by albums. My music folder is organised in the form ‘artist/album/track’, so when multiple tracks from the same album have different artists, they can end up in totally separate places. The album view in ncmpcpp (accessed with the default keybindings by pressing 4 a few times) mitigates this by putting everything back together.

It does have a few tiny issues, some of which will be explained below, including the fact that it just crashes if the window gets too small. I use a tiling window manager, so I have inadvertently done this a few times, especially on my smaller laptop screen.

The curses client created by the developers of MPD. For most people, this has been largely superseded by ncmpcpp, but I do find it has a few nice features in comparison.

While it doesn’t have Vi keys by default, it does have an interactive keybinding editor (which writes back to a plain-text config file), that I found easier to use than the offering for ncmpcpp. Since I customised the bindings for ncmpc myself, I find them more comfortable than the (still-default) ones for ncmpcpp.

Yes, Emacs comes by default with an MPD client. Is it good? Not really. Is it funny that it exists? Most definitely.

As a side note, this is one of the few Emacs programs that actually makes use of the tool bar, putting player control buttons there, so remember to turn on tool-bar-mode if you ever give this one a look.

Ario comes with all the upsides and downsides you would expect from a typical GUI program. You can click and drag UI elements to resize them, and drag and drop tracks into and around in the playlist. I can see this being more intuitive than the options provided by the other clients for precisely arranging tracks in a playlist. I normally listen in shuffle, or to whole albums in sequence, so this has never been of great benefit to me.

On the other hand, it lacks pretty much any keybindings, and doesn’t provide access to many of the features the TUI clients do. A slight oddity is that the window seems to ‘want’ to be really big, causing weird behaviour if you try to force it to take up anything less than 80% of the screen. I normally have to keep it off on a workspace all by itself.

I have also briefly used the xfmpc (GUI) client, but it provides such a minimal feature set that it really isn’t worth using in any situation.

I am not sure if this is needed any more, or whether the core MPD binary now supports MPRIS directly. MPRIS is the standard ‘media player control’ interface on Linux/UNIX/whatever, which allows media players to be controlled centrally via a GUI interface in a desktop environment, or using the playerctl program. It also adds system notifications for when MPD starts or stops.

I have media keybindings that use playerctld, which automatically tracks which media player I was using most recently, making it simple for me to use one set of keybindings to control most of the media players on my system.