MPaD
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’s a great solution to link a headless computer system to your audio installation.
The iPad makes for an ideal companion to MPD with the introduction of MPaD. An intuitive and great looking interface makes it very easy to browse through a large collection of songs, and find the album or song that you want to hear.
MPaD will be available shortly from the AppStore for $2.99 / €2.39. MPoD (which can also be used on an iPad) is and will remain free.
The following features are available from MPaD:
- Connects to your MPD server over TCP/IP.
- Automatically find MPD servers that make themselves know via Bonjour/Zeroconf.
- Supports the use of a password for making a connection to the server.
- Store multiple connection profiles.
- Fast application startup.
- Cover art from Amazon or local http server.
- Volume control.
- Move to previous, next song.
- Move to any song in active playlist.
- Edit the active playlist (move tracks, delete tracks).
- Seek in song.
- Toggle random, repeat.
- List of artists with drilldown to albums and songs.
- Option to hide artists that only appear on compilation albums.
- List of albums with drilldown to songs.
- Option to group songs into albums based on server directory.
- List of songs, which also displays artist and album for each song.
- All lists are searchable.
- List of all playlists.
- Save the active playlist into a saved playlist.
- Choice between ‘add to active playlist’ or ‘replace active playlist’.
- Support for last.fm.
- Full iOS4 compatibility including background operation.
- Works well with Mopidy (mpd like Spotify player).
Check-out a 2-minute screencast that shows MPaD in action, or have a look at some screenshots below:
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Hi,
I first have to say that I really love MPaD.
Still, I have two feature requests:
- In my house, I’m planning to add some more MPD-devices. They all use the same music (from a central file server) and the same playlist directory. That way, they all have a similar database. I saw that I can add multiple servers to MPaD, tbat’s brilliant (although there seems to be a problem with that, see comment underneath mine). Would it be possible to add sole kind of ‘shortcut’ to the interface to switch between different connections? Now I would have to go to ‘Settings’ each time.
- Would it be possible to add another ‘View’ that shows the lyrics of the current song? This is not supported by MPD, but it’s always possible to fetch the lyrics from internet?
Regards,
Bram
In the next version I will add a button from which you can quickly switch between players.
I have no plans to add lyrics. You can add liner notes to albums (as a pdf in the album directory on the server) and if you share that out via http MPaD can pick it up.
Lyrics are the last big thing (beside of rating, but thats a MPD issue
i am also missing in MPaD. I played around with liner notes but its not really comfortable for lyrics.
Hello,
I just installed this app and find it quite amazing.
)
However, I have one problem.
I have two mpd’s running on my server and I want to be able switch between the two.
As mentioned I can store multiple connection profiles, but the switching does not work.
When I switch from one to another, the old data is still shown.
I guess this is a local cache problem, but whatever i try, I can’t get the app to show the correct data.
mpod has the same problem (I should have taken the other mpd server first, then at least I could use one app for one mpd and the other app to connect to the other mpd
Album view shows a limited amount after switching (which I think is aligned with the new connection), but the info is from the previous connection.
The other views show all info from the previous connection.
The directory listing is completely correct.
I also verified with gmpc who shows the info correctly.
Can someone look into this problem, please ?
With kind regards,
H.
I have to look into the problem that occurs when you switch connections. It seems there is some database caching going on that I’m not aware about.
BTW, the next version will have an easier way to switch between connections.
Cool, that sounds very good.
Any idea when the next version will be available ?
I’m still very happy with the app after using it for a couple of days…
The new version is posted to the AppStore, hopefully it’s there in the next couple of days.
Hi
Great app, love it!
I have two questions/requests:
- would it be possible for mpad (and mpod) to read m3u playlists located on the server?
- is it possible to prevent mpad to scan a particular folder?
Thanks a lot
Thierry
This makes imho not much sense, because such functionalities should be, if needed, integrated directly into the server MPD. So maybe make a entry at the MPD mantis.
I agree.
Hi!
Saw the combination of MPD and MPaD at a friends place and found it really great!!
But my question is: can I use MPaD just to control the server or is it possible to control a client as well? Similar to UPnP where i have the server, the media renderer and a control point (=MPaD).
I’d like to have one server and more clients which can all be controlled by MPaD.
Thanks a lot!
MPaD controls only the server. The server (mpd) can deliver to multiple outputs but those outputs are not controlled by MPaD (apart from enabling/disabling them). For the setup your looking for I think you’re better off using squeezeboxserver.
Wicked app, works like a charm!
Was wondering if it would be possible to include a player to make use of the http streaming capabilities of mpd 0.15+ (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Configuration#Built-in_HTTP_streaming) ? I now use MPad to control my Popcorn Hour C200 for music playback over my HiFi system, but being able to listen to the same music as a stream on my IPad would be awesome for using it in other rooms!
Keep up the good work!
This is supported. You have to configure either dual outputs on your mpd server (one for the built-in sound device on the popcorn and one for the http stream) or run 2 mpd servers in parallel.
To pick up the stream on the iPad, configure the connection in MPaD as ‘On-the-go’ instead of ‘Remote’, and enter the correct URL where the stream is delivered. That should do it. Note that only mp3 is supported.
OK, thats cool! do you think that a flac stream will be supported the future?
Due to limited cpu power (arm integer only unit) i am currently using a wav stream (this works also!).
This works due to big bandwidth requirements for wave only in my home network. So i am also interested in a flac stream.
Only streams that are supported natively by the iOS SDK are supported. I’m not sure if flac is one of those. What I know for sure it that ogg-vorbis doesn’t work.
Hi
I think mpad is the best mpd client at the moment! Great work!
I have a minor annoyance. When you sort by artists it seems that there is some automatic letter capitalization going on.
Example:
The artist 10cc is tagged as 10cc. It is also displayed as 10cc in GMPC, foobar2000 and others, but in mpad it is displayed as 10Cc. The same is valid for others too. It almost seems like it does automatic capitalization of the first letter but it doesn’t understand that the numbers is part of the name.
IMHO the artist tags should be displayed exactly as they are written in the tags withouth any modification like in other software.
Other examples:
2nd Mary -> 2Nd Mary
3rd Moon -> 3Rd Moon
Feature request:
It would also be perfect if it was possible to implement a nice and dark full screen “Now Playing” screen with large high rez cover art and some other track info like in a lot of other clients for other systems (SqueezePad, Apple Remote, Plug Player etc).
Thanks
In a recent version I added some automatic modification of artist names to give them uppercase. I’ve come to realize that this is a bad idea (or at least a bad implementation) and that people should instead get there id3 tagging done correctly.
I will probably remove this feature (or make it user-selectable).
I am also not happy the new automatic modification. Would prefer the former solution too.
In the next version it’s an option that’s off by default.
Hi – overall I really like your app. I noticed one bug and have one request for a new feature:
BUG – Whenever you add new music to your external HD you have to delete the mPad app from the iPad and then reinstall it. Without doing this step, the mPad does not recognize the new music, and, in fact, makes mistakes with the old music (e.g., alphabetizes it incorrectly).
FEATURE – Would LOVE to have some way to rate songs and create a playlist based on song-ratings….similar to iTunes rating system. Very helpful to be able to do this…..or else be able to import the ratings that I’ve already done in iTunes.
Many thanks.
Matt
Matt you have to recreate your database on the server
/usr/bin/mpd –create-db
I put this command in my local.stop on my server so everytime I shut the machine down it rebuilds the database. Some clients do send this command however I think.
copy this, have been adding quite a lot of content and just can’t seem to make Mpad include it in the library.
one request – or maybe just a question, I have lots of ‘various artists’ / compilation cd’s. I’ve used ‘MAX’ for ripping my cd’s and tagged them as ‘compilations’. they also appear this way in my folders. Yet in Mpad, under artists, each song from compilations albums appear as if they have their own album. Ideally, I’d like or expect Mpad to recognize the ‘compilations’ to be the artist – with all underlying compilation albums as sub content.
can I configure Mpad to do so – if yes, please advise how to, if not, then this is a request to add as a feature.
great app in general! job well done!
M
The next version will have much improved support for compilations.
Hi there
Agree mPad is a great client and is now my preferred interface to my music collection. I posted another comment about having some of my album art named Folder.jpg and some named folder.jpg. Would it be possible to enhance mPad to ignore case or to handle multiple file names for cover art?
Also, I have purchased 1.6.1 but do not have the option of downloading 1.6.2 when I visit the App store. Can I reset this in some way?
thanks
If you’re web server is case sensitive then the only way to do this is by doing two requests, one capitalized and one not-capitalized. I added that to the to-do list.
As for the version, I forgot to upgrade the version number in the about screen to 1.6.2 in the last version, so although you have version 1.6.2 it will still read 1.6.1.
Just a feature request- It would be great to have the Artist tab use album art like the Album tab. I don’t generally use the Album tab because that always seems like an illogical way to sort music. Something like iTunes “Artist by album” in the Artist tab would be nice.
Love the app though, outstanding work!
I can have a look at this one. I’ll see if artist artwork can be retrieved in some way.
Hi,
Great client for MPD and job well done! I do have one question and that is how to get last.fm working? Thoughts???
Thnaks
last.fm has to be enabled in the server and configured in [/etc/mpd.conf]. Configuration differs on whether you use mpd v0.15 or v0.16. For 0.16 it works with a plugin configured like this:
input {
plugin “lastfm”
user “xxx”
password “yyy”
}