MPD Configuration
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
As its name indicates, the Music Player Daemon — or MPD for short
— is a daemon that manages music files on a computer and plays them.
It can be manipulated by various front-end applications, such as the
command-line utility mpc, TUI ncmpcpp, or GUI cantata. In my case, I
use mainly ncmpcpp and Emacs’ EMMS.
On my computer, MPD runs as a user daemon, as seen in my bootstrap file here.
2. Required Parameters
MPD requires a few compulsory parameters that we will see below.
| Parameter name | Value | Comment |
|---|---|---|
follow_outside_symlinks |
yes |
Whether to follow symlinks pointing outside the music directory |
follow_inside_symlinks |
yes |
Whether to follow symlinks pointing inside the music directory |
db_file |
~/.config/mpd/database |
Location of MPD’s database |
sticker_file |
~/.config/mpd/sticker.sql |
Location of the sticker database (dynamic information attached to songs) |
log_file |
~/.config/mpd/log |
Location of MPD’s log file |
follow_outside_symlinks "yes" follow_inside_symlinks "yes" db_file "~/.config/mpd/database" sticker_file "~/.config/mpd/sticker.sql" log_file "~/.config/mpd/log"
3. Optional Parameters
While these values are not strictly necessary, some are still useful
such as music_directory: we don’t have to manually add our music to
MPD each time we run it.
| Parameter | Value | Comment |
|---|---|---|
music_directory |
~/Music |
Location of the music directory |
playlist_directory |
~/Music/playlists |
Location of MPD playlists |
pid_file |
~/.config/mpd/pid |
Location of MPD’s PID |
state_file |
~/.config/mpd/state |
File where the state of MPD is saved when killed |
bind_to_address |
localhost |
Limit MPD to the localhost address |
auto_update |
yes |
No need to manually update MPD’s database with mpc update |
music_directory "~/Music" playlist_directory "~/Music/playlists" pid_file "~/.config/mpd/pid" state_file "~/.config/mpd/state" bind_to_address "localhost" auto_update "yes"
4. Audio outputs
Two audio outputs will be defined. The first one sets Pulseaudio up so I can actually hear my music. Its configuration is simple, really.
audio_output { type "pulse" name "pulse audio" }
Another one sets up the visualizer of ncmpcpp. It is not necessary to
create this one if you don’t plan on using this feature.
audio_output { type "fifo" name "my_fifo" path "/tmp/mpd.fifo" format "44100:16:2" }